Sometimes digiKam face tags apply, sometimes they don't

I’ve been enjoying tagging photos from my personal collection. I run a face detect scan, recognize scan, correct and/or approve. Rinse and repeat. It’s been slow going, but fun to see familiar faces pop up and it’s mindless clicking that makes me feel productive.

Well, all that joy came to a screeching halt when I realized not all my face tags were being applied in the metadata all the time. I have no idea why they normally apply, but occasionally they don’t. Here are the details…

  • Running DigiKam 8.3 on Windows 10 on my computer
  • All photos are stored on a networked Windows 11 computer using Stablebit for drive pooling
  • In Settings > Metadata, for things to be written to metadata I have everything selected, including “Face Tags (including face areas)”. (I’ve excluded GPS)
  • I don’t have “Use lazy synchronization” or “Update file modification timestamp when files are modified” checked.

I used Adobe Bridge for most of my actual photo browsing and work. That’s where I noticed that most files will have the face/name tags show up, but inexplicably a few files will sometimes be empty. Nothing is different about those files as far as I can tell; they’re from the same series, same camera, they’re not in special folders or grouped up in anyway, same jpg format.

I found a guilty file, applied keywords and face tags in digiKam. Nothing showed up in Bridge or viewing the details in File Explorer. (So I know it wasn’t just a cache issue with Bridge.) I also selected the file in digiKam, clicked Item > Write Metadate to File and nothing worked.

Any ideas what might be going on?