Having had to retag the same large set of photographs several times
over, I empathize with your situation.
I'm using digikam 1.7 on Ubuntu 10.10. Instead of relying on the
database remaining uncorrupted, I've been writing my tags and captions
back to the images themselves.
For reasons unrelated to your situation, I've deleted my digikam
database several times over and started afresh. Because I've been
writing the tags and captions back to the image, upon building a fresh
database, all the tags and captions appear in the new database. Using
exiftool, I've done a lot of testing to verify that the tags and
captions are indeed being written to the images.
I have jpegs from some point-and-shoot cameras, and I just let digikam
write directly to these jpegs. As I have backups of all the images,
and writing to jpegs is pretty safe, I wasn't afraid to risk letting
digikam write to the jpegs.
I also have raw (.cr2) files from a digital SLR camera. AFAIK, digikam
doesn't write to .cr2 images (and I wouldn't trust it just yet, even
if someone said it did, being overly cautious about such things). So I
use dcraw to extract the jpeg thumb that automatically gets embedded
in every raw file (exiftool and exiv2 also can extract the embedded
thumbnail, and exiftool can be set up to copy ALL the raw metadata to
the extracted thumb).
So my raw files aren't even in my database. Rather I tag and caption
and rate the extracted thumbnails and save the tags, captions, ratings
to the extracted thumbnail jpegs. (How to easily coordinate retrieving
the corresponding raw files is a bridge I haven't crossed yet.) As the
extracted thumbs all have the extension ".thumbs.jpg", they are easy
to tell apart from the point-and-shoot camera jpegs (also, I keep the
point-n-shoot images and the raw-file-thumbs in separate directories).
Hope some of the above might be helpful. Like yourself, I never, ever
want to have to retag those images again.
Elle Stone
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