vkdt export loses digikam metadata

Software vkdt
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I’m playing around a bit with vkdt lately (mostly with the filmsim module). When I export images, camera metadata (stuff like exposure time, aperture, etc.) is included in the exported file but things like description and tags which I previously added in digiKam are not.

In vkdt the “exif” setting is set to “copy from main input”.
digiKam is configured to write everything to sidecar files. Maybe this is the problem? Is there some way to make vkdt aware of these additional metadata so that it is included in the exported files?

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don’t really know about digikam. but vkdt is surely not parsing any extra sidecar files.

if you look through the source image with exiftool, does it contain any of the digikam stuff? if not, vkdt probably doesn’t see it.

the metadata handling is really stupid, it just calls exiftool as a post process after exporting the pixels. if exiftool understands digikam files i suppose it’ll be easy to add a one-liner to o-jpg/main.c to copy the data over.

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Thanks for the quick reply!
I just made a test. Just calling exiftool on the raw file (i.e. exiftool 123.orf) does not show the digikam-metadata. However, it can read the xmp file directly (exiftool 123.orf.xmp) then its there.

At least based on my very quick research, exiftool doesn’t seem to have an option to automatically look for additional sidecar files when called on the original file.

So I guess for vkdt to be able to get the data, it would need to check if a xmp sidecar exists and and use that one instead of the source file for copying metadata. Or maybe metadata of both files would need to be read and merged, as it seems the sidecar contains some but not all of the metadata of the original source file…
So not sure how easy that would be to get right.

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For me exiftool installed via brew didn’t work but layered via rpm-ostree did. If this is relevant in your case.

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…does the xmp contain all the data or additional data?

should not be hard to have exiftool copy over stuff from the xmp too. exif comes in IFD0 and in the xmp namespaces.

i might want to make this a user configurable command line, like the metadata display panel.

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Some of the data is duplicate (basic stuff like shutter speed, focal length, …) but there are a lot of fields in the raw file that are missing in the xmp, so I think it’s rather additional.