Bug 497531

SUMMARY

As Digikam is picking up in popularity, the DAM use case is probably weighing in more and more.  

Nowadays, even a small family album can be seen, in many ways, as a miniature DAM of some sorts... which boils down to....  Metadata.

Luckily, the basics are already there : Date, Title, Caption, ... 

But there is a whole bunch other popular medata fields that are simply a pain to work with in Digikam at this point.

- Take "source", for example : We are (sort of) able to do data entry on it (through templates)... But then we can't really meaningfully use it anywhere (search, table view, filters, ...)
- Similar story with "author" / "creator"... which is luckily included in SEARCH, but not much of anywhere else..
- ...

Imho, bringing all DC(Dublin Core) and IPTC fields into being "first class class citizens" would be a good starting point. 

However, being able to deal with ANY arbitraty metadata would be a game changer (though, I do realize that kind of generic support might be more challenging). 

Here's a short list of the kinds of things I would love to be able to do with ANY metadata field :

- search queries
- table views  (as a custom column)
- filters
- thumbnail view (as a custom field by selecting it in preferences)
- data entry (single image)
- data entry (multiple images)
- ... anywhere else ?

For me, it starts out with SEARCH, that's why I had first opted to put this as a comment on #367700. But obviously, it doesn't stop there. There are a bunch of other places (Table Views, Filters, ...) where being able to deal with ANY arbitrary metadata would be extremely useful. 

BTW, when I say ANY arbitrary metadata field, I really mean it. 

This even includes the so called "composite tags" generated on the fly by ExifTool, which may even be user-defined ones.  (Those already show up in the Metadata View. So Digikam is already capable of fetching them.)

Let's face it, one doesn't usually have full control over what metadata is written for an image, or where...  This is true even for photos we take ourselves (as dictated by the camera) ... And it is more so for pictures that come from elsewhere... which may include those that were taken by a cousin (in a family setting)... or pictures sent by a photo agency (in a professional DAM setting). 

So, even if we try to settle for a small subset of Metadata fields ourselves, we still need to be able to deal with the reality of what flows into our collections... be it in a family setting, or a non-profit organisation, or professional collections.