Question about xmp file naming in digikam

Software digiKam
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I’ve a collection of digital photos going back 27 years and have just installed digiKam. I have a question about how to handle xmp files.

I’ve been using Lightroom until a few days ago. All the xmp files are of the format filename.xmp. This hasn’t been a problem before now, but I see the warning about using this convention for xmp files in digiKam, particularly if I were to use darktable.

What is the best approach? I don’t particularly want to go through 27 years of photos and rename all the xmp files, but how much trouble will it cause if I tick the “sidecar names are compatible with commercial programs” box?

There are ~140,000 files in my photo folders. I haven’t counted how many are xmp files.

(I posted a question related to this elsewhere but I posed the wrong question. I thought the problem was IPTC but it’s xmp.)

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Coming from Lightroom with thousands of images years ago I had the same problem. Since I decided to use darktable as my main (and meanwhile exclusive) raw editor, the way to go was basename.extension.xmp. I did so and never regretted it to date.

If you decide to keep the basename.xmp pattern, darktable won’t read the sidecars, but create its own XMP’s, so you would have two XMP versions beside each other. That wouldn’t be a real problem, just superfluous. The only argument to keep both XMP patterns I can think of is the parallel use of commercial apps like Lightroom and FOSS like darktable.

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Thanks for this. I haven’t settled on a raw editor yet. In the meantime I’ll keep the xmp files the way they are.

I’ve read up a bit more and I’ve read that darktable will copy the abcd.xmp to abcd.cr3.xmp and use the latter from that point on.

So, if/when I try out darktable I’ll use it on a sample of copied photo files, both to see how I like it and to check what happens to the converted xmp file. If I stick with darktable, then I’ll do the name conversion of all the xmp files before using it with my main photo collection.

If you (or anyone) sees a problem with that approach, please let me know.

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I’ve read up a bit more and I’ve read that darktable will copy the abcd.xmp to abcd.cr3.xmp and use the latter from that point on

Exactly. And if darktable detects a file already named abcd.cr3.xmp it will start a new section in this file and leave the rest as it is.

If you (or anyone) sees a problem with that approach, please let me know.

I can’t find any problem with it, good luck!

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Hello, I am a bit in the same situation, reverting to Digikam on a +200k collection. I had LRC made all the xmp first. Without saying. Then…

I’m seeking confirmation if the below will work…

First step

In digikam “settings”, “configure”, “sidecars”

  • read from sidecar = yes
  • write from sidecar = no
  • sidecar files compatible with commercial software = yes

Second step

Now that my collection has been taken in by Digikam I think I can now safely change that setting to:

  • read from sidecar files = yes
  • write to sidecare files = write to item and sidecar file (I don’t mind too much about preserving raw immaticulate)
  • sidecar files compatible with = no

I suppose that Digikam will start creating name.ext.xmp files now, and that I can safely delete any name.xmp file later?

Am I right with this?

Thank you for looking into this.

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Check that the name.ext.xmp exists before deleting name.xmp, or force writing the sidecars once (Afaik, digikam doesn’t write a sidecar if there are no changes).

As for writing to items: that’s not always possible, and can be risky with raw files (there are even cases where software from the camera manufacturer got it wrong…). So you’ll have to check an extra option to write to raw files. Even then, for some (most?) raw formats there’s just not enough known about the format to write to it safely, so digikam won’t write to those files in any case.

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