Version: (using KDE 4.2.4) OS: Linux Installed from: Compiled From Sources It would be nice if digiKam allowed the user x to "copy" selected albums to a portable drive, x have the images tagged/commented/rated/etc. on another computer (i.e. with a different database) x import the updated images back to local computer (overwriting the old ones) and automatically update the local database for new tags/comments. With 1.0.0-beta2 this is possible only when the user synchronises metadata to images and rebuilding database from scratch (i.e. delete the local database and search for new images).
From 1.0-beta4 you will have obvious and clearly labelled menu actions to reread metadata from images, so at least you dont need to delete your database. But yes, reading from the individual images' metadata is the way to go currently. In which format would you expect to transfer back the added information from the other machine?
Even the possibility to re-read metadata from individual messages would be fine in the first stage - currently, this does not work for new (i.e. locally non-existing) tags, only the captions and existing tags are updated in the local database (as assigned to the particular image). The workflow for future could be: 1. On the first computer: in a special plugin / tool: select albums to be copied to the portable device; 2. digiKam would mirror the folder tree (with the images) to a selected root folder on the device and also create a remote database referring to the UUID and the root folder of the portable drive; Also, it would offer if the albums on local computer can be deleted (from disk and database); 3a. on the second computer, the user would open the database from the portable drive and do tagging or editing of images; 3b. if the second computer also has some other collections, the databases could be merged and user offered a possibility to move the collection of images from the portable drive into the local album collection; If during the merger of albums there already exists an old copy, digiKam would overwrite those in case the source is newer then destination. Of course, this could possibly lead to a loss of data if the user edited both versions of images/metadata in the meantime. The same steps can be done to get the images from the second computer back to the first one. This functionality would generally allow to migrate the collections/albums together with the relevant part of the database.
Thank you for the bug report. As this report hasn't seen any changes in 5 years or more, we ask if you can please confirm that the issue still persists. If this bug is no longer persisting or relevant please change the status to resolved.
Although this request is not yet implemented as a feature, reading and writing metadata from and to images seems reliable - I have used it several times. So, the user can solve the problem through: a) always 'write metadata to images' (or XMP) b) careful syncing of album tree or its part with some other computers c) and manually re-reading metadata. Since a dedicated tool within digikam has not gained much attention, I am closing the bug now.
We plan to support better a remote database shared by multi-users. For the moment it do not work well without plenty a secure settings to apply. We need an auto lock mechanism with the database access. Gilles Caulier