At the moment, when using the GPS Correlator, or setting the position by hand, the position is stored in the image metadata while using JPG format. It would be nice to have an option to tell the GPS Correlator to store the GPS coordinates only in digikam database and not in the files metadata, just like happens for RAW images. The reason for this are 2: 1. I don't like the fact the my original files are tampered in any manner. I like my original files to stay identical of when they come out of the camera. When I have edited and selected the pictures I'd like to "publish" I use the batch processing to cook all my metadata into them and resize, creating another set of pictures to be later uploaded. 2. Usually geotagging is the second thing I do after importing, this means that when I apply the GPS locations it has to recreate with the updated metadata all the files that I have just imported and since there are usually a lot of files, this takes a lot of time. Meanwhile just storing that data in the database it's surely faster.
When using digikam for the first time (some longer time ago) I deactivated any writing to the metadata (Options-->Metadata) for the same reason as Mattia states in his first point: Nothing should change the original file expect I want to do that. Today I got also aware of the issue reported here because all my tagged files got updated with the GPS locations. From my point of view there is a missing option for "GPS data" in the Metadata options which would work as proposed by Mattia.
This entry is illegible for GSoC 2016 project : https://community.kde.org/GSoC/2016/Ideas#Project:_digiKam_MetadataHub_improvements
Maik, I think this file is fixed with master code. Right ? Gilles
Yes, fixed in master. Maik