Metadata template and Captions information

Software digiKam
,
1

Hi all,
I am using digikam to review my library and have started to spend some time adding metadata to my photos, specifically title, captions and copyright information.

I have created a Metadata template with some basic information. From what I understand the information in this data is about me, the author.

SCR-20230912-pfuw
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I put:

  • Job Title: Photographer
  • Credit: Copyright Name Surname ; here I interpreted it as "if you find this photo you must use this wording to give credit to the author; e.g., if my wife takes a photo of me the credits are hers, but the copyright for some reason is mine)
  • Copyright: Copyright Name Surname. All rights reserved ; this is the full copyright sentence
  • Source: namesurname.com ; I interpreted it as where to retrieve information about the author
    And for simplicity’s sake I put my website.

SCR-20230912-pglt
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In the second tab - Location - the required information is about the content location. This is a problem because I would have to create a template for each image or set of images and it becomes impractical. So I selected the default for most of the pictures and my idea was to change it by hand for pictures in other countries.

SCR-20230912-pgsk
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But currently if I select an image and tried to ovverride Italy with another country it is not possible to change it.

Did I misinterpret the template? Initially I thought the metadata template was to create a template per author, for example in case we were multiple authors in an agency I could have the template for each individual contributor with their own data and country. This is because it would be easier to attribute the credits and to be able to find the author (name and nationality).

Also now that I have assigned country to some images I would like to remove the metadata and the only way is to assign location “Unknown” because the option to leave it blank is missing.

I am confused and would like your opinion before I continue to assign metadata the wrong way.

2

Those fields can only be filled from a template, and are never editable. I don’t know why they are uneditable.

I think the fields correspond to IPTC tags, so it would be nice to be able to use them. But as you said, making a template for every location can get very tedious (not to mention the “subject” bit in addition).

That said, I just use tags in a tree for lacation: a base tag “Loc” to anchor the tree, then tags as needed for the various images. As it’s for personal use only, I can get away with not being very sytematic about it :wink: : sometimes I just have the Loc/city, others haveLoc/country/region/province/city, sometimes there’s even more detail then just the city; I don’t mind looking through some tens of images, with some hundreds it becomes time to add more detail (which is in the description anyway)

3

Thanks for your feedback.
I’m wondering what is @dkdeveloper opinion. Is this something expected? If it’s a bug I can open a ticket.

4

The templates in digiKam are a long story, we have some bug entries. As of digiKam-8.0.0, we no longer simply overwrite templates (this led to data loss for many people) but rather merge them. I was able to quickly overwrite the country and didn’t find any problems, but I’ll test it more closely over the next few days.
Please note that since digiKam-8.0.0 you can also fill in the location metadata automatically with the geolocation editor and the reverse geolocation search. You add the OpenStreetMaps tags there and only select Location Metadata in the options.