I just now learned this wonderful ability and thought I would share it here for others who may be wanting to accomplish the same thing.
If you are like me and will never use face tagging and would like to cleanse your keyword tags tree of all of those big Smiley Face icons so that you can replace them with image thumbnails, it can be done.
The How To is a bit hard to find and figure out; so, I hope my attempt at explaining will be of use to others.
On the extreme left side of the window is a vertical list of tabs; - on my machine, “People” is the first tab at the bottom end of the list; - click that to open the people tags manipulator.
What you can do is to un-assign keyword tags as being face tags; - you can do this individually one tag at a time; or, you can do a whole parent tag and all of it’s children.
If you follow closely, you won’t erase any of your tags from the images metadata.
If you don’t pay close attention, you will erase the actual tags from the images metadata.
It would be a good idea to find your database files and copy them to a safe place, just in case something goes South.
When you click the People tab, you will see all of your parent tags that digiKam thinks should be associated with Face Tags.
You can expand these to navigate down to a single tag.
First, I did a single tag to test the waters; everything seemed to work so I did a small batch.
Once I felt comfortable with the process and decided it wasn’t erasing my actual keyword tags, I started doing entire main parent tags and all of their children; - thousands at a time.
Begin by selecting a parent tag in the People tab/pane and Right-Click it.
In the menu that appears, choose “Unmark Tag as Face” - second choice from the bottom
A little box will appear = “Face tag _____ has at least one face tag child. Removing it will remove all the children. Do you want to continue ? YES or CANCEL”
If you wish to disassociate that parent keyword tag and all sub-tags beneath it from Face Tagging and therefore get rid of all those big smiley faces, click YES.
Another little box will appear = “Remove face tag ? YES or CANCEL”, click YES.
Another little box will appear: “Remove the x-many tags corresponding to this face tags from the images ? YES or NO” ; this is where you had best be cautious = click NO, unless you want to lose all of your actual tags.
I did this one main parent tag at a time, all under the big parent tag People; such as People > Friends, People > Family, People > Narcissists, etc.
Before each maneuver, I made note of how many images were associated with each main parent tag and made sure that number did not change.
Now, a bit of background about my own specific keywords tags tree:
Way back when digiKam first introduced those big smiley faces and my People tree was absolutely plastered with them, I began searching for some way to outsmart digiKam and avoid all that mess.
Many things I attempted I would get notice that I couldn’t do this or that.
What I was able to do and it worked pretty good for a long while = I renamed the main factory-supplied People to “zPeople” ; what this accomplished is that it put zPeople right down there at the bottom of my tags tree; right down there beneath Zebras and Zoologists.
I then created a new main parent tag “___People” ; by employing the underscores, this put ___People straight to the head of the class, up there out of the way of everything else.
I then, little by little, drag/dropped all of my People sub-tags into my new ___People parent tag.
This move fooled digiKam for a long time and I was happily able to populate my ___People tag tree with all manner of “child” sub-tags, with nary an obnoxious smiley face in sight.
Then one day it happened; there among all of my neat image thumbnail icons was a big old smiley face.
Like mice and rats, once I saw one, I started seeing dozens, and then hundreds and more.
So,
as I one-by-one eliminated face tag association from all of my main parent tags under ___People, I saved one without doing it — I was afraid if I went ahead and did them all that ___People would disappear from the People tab/pane and I would not be able to disassociate t as well.
When I got them all gone save for the one, I selected and right-clicked ___People and disassociated it as well.
Things were going so well that I went ahead and also did zPeople and removed it from the equation.
I then tried to delete zPeople, but digiKam would not allow it.
After all of this work, I am back to where I started way back before face tags with nary a smiley face in sight.
If, in the future, I start seeing smiley faces again, I am going to do as I did before when I created the new parent ___People tag, except this time, choose a tag name that does not include the letters people, such as ___Criminals or ___Neanderthals or ___Reprobates
Thanks for reading and I hope this is helpful to others.
Remember, BE CAREFUL and BACK UP YOUR DATABASE