[digiKam-users] New to digikam
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Hi... I am new to digikam.... I do really have a big mess of photographs all
around hard drives, SDs, and local drives in several computers. Some pictures or perhaps many are duplicated..... So I want to fix this mess and organize my photographs. What I do want to do is to centralize all pictures in a high capacity hard drive (external), back it up and the delete the photographs in the source drives...... What would be the right steps to do it in order to proceed systematically and safely, without duplicating files and ending up with a bigger mess! It is not clear to me if Digikam stores automatically the photos in the database or just it keeps a link with the source file or a thumbnail. I would kindly appreciate your advice and guidance. I do not know how many photographs do I have, so I wonder if it would be OK to change to Mysql at the very beginning .?? I have an Asus laptop computer with Windows. Regards Santiago (Mexico) -- Sent from: http://digikam.1695700.n4.nabble.com/digikam-users-f1735189.html |
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Le 28/07/2019 à 19:11, santiago a écrit :
> Hi... I am new to digikam.... I do really have a big mess of photographs all > around hard drives, SDs, and local drives in several computers. Some like most of us at some point in the past :-). The digikam albums are simply operating system folders, so it's best to first collect all your photos and store then under the same tree. The only sorting system that give always a good result is chronological one I always store my photos by date. Picture date if available, else sorting date after a starting sort by hand, digikam can be set to analyze the images and do more complex sorting, the first being tagging images (long work, have to be done manually) jdd -- http://dodin.org |
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In reply to this post by santiago
Hello Santiago,
welcome to the digiKam mailing list. DigiKam only stores links to the pictures in the filesystem in its database. To organize your pictures, I would do the following: 1. make a table with all your folders containing pictures: - column 01: "Laptop / Storage device" - column 02: "Filesystem path" - column 03: "copied to new picture storage" - column 04: "deleted from old storage" - one row for every "old storage location 2. for every row on your list: 2.1 copy the pictures from "old storage location" to "new storage" 2.2 check if "number of files" and "folder size" are equal 2.3 put a "check" mark in column 03 of your table in the appropriate row 3. verify, that there is a "check" mark in column 03 for every row in your table 4. make a backup of your new picture storage 5. for every row on your list: 5.1 delete the pictures on your old storage 5.2 put a "check" mark in column 04 of your table 6. start digiKam and add your "new storage" as new collection (if you want to modify collections after the first start of digiKam, go to Settings -> Configure digiKam -> Collections) 7. digiKam will start to scan this new storage and add database entries for every picture found. The picture only exists in the filesystem (where you copied to in step 2.1). The digikam database only stores: e.g. "picture resides in path '/home/user/Pictures/album01/myPicture01.jpg' 8. to remove duplicates, you can use "Tools -> Find Duplicates" I am still using digiKam 5.9 (Debian Jessie). I have 47.000 pictures in my digiKam database at the moment and I have no problems, using the SQLite databse. Hope, this helps. Regards, Peter On 28.07.19 19:11, santiago wrote: > Hi... I am new to digikam.... I do really have a big mess of photographs all > around hard drives, SDs, and local drives in several computers. Some > pictures or perhaps many are duplicated..... So I want to fix this mess and > organize my photographs. What I do want to do is to centralize all pictures > in a high capacity hard drive (external), back it up and the delete the > photographs in the source drives...... What would be the right steps to do > it in order to proceed systematically and safely, without duplicating files > and ending up with a bigger mess! It is not clear to me if Digikam stores > automatically the photos in the database or just it keeps a link with the > source file or a thumbnail. I would kindly appreciate your advice and > guidance. I do not know how many photographs do I have, so I wonder if it > would be OK to change to Mysql at the very beginning .?? I have an Asus > laptop computer with Windows. Regards Santiago (Mexico) > > > > -- > Sent from: http://digikam.1695700.n4.nabble.com/digikam-users-f1735189.html > |
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In reply to this post by santiago
Hi Santiago,
Here is what I would do: First of all, I'd put all pictures in the same drive, and then, super important, make a backup. And leave that backup alone. You never know when a file can get corrupted, or you need to know where it was located originally (for context) or even know its file modification date (sometimes they don't have metadata). Then I would start organizing the pictures manually. I believe the most intuitive method is organizing your library in events. For instance, a folder for each birthday, wedding, baptism, holiday trip, dinner at a restaurant, etc. I write the date of the event at the beginning of the folder name in this format: YYYY-MM-DD. For instance: "2017-06-13 Santiago's birthday". If you do it this way, folders will be automatically sorted in chronological order your file browser. It's possible that you have folders that are compilations of pictures that do not belong to any event. In that case, I'd group them by person. Like, if you have several scanned photos of your great-aunt, create a folder for her. I would not rename any filenames, except maybe for old scanned pictures. Filenames often provide context about the order the picture was taken, and with what camera. Backup again. If possible, at this point, set up some kind of backup system, so you can create periodical incremental backups. You know when you might go back and revert some unwanted changes on a picture. If you can store that backup in a different physical location, that's even better (that way the backup is safe in case of fire, theft, flooding, etc. which I hope never happens). At this point, you can already use the picture manager of your choice. In this case, digikam. Digikam does not store the pictures in its database, only small thumbnails, so the current folder structure that you just organized will be the original pictures. Changes on these pictures (Keywords, dates, faces, gps coordinates...) will be saved in the metadata. You can choose whether you want to save that metadata directly on the original file, or use sidecar files for that. The former is more convenient, but there are more risks, can be slower, and some people avoid overwriting the original files at all costs. With sidecars (little .xml files), you have to make sure to always keep them next to their picture. That's your choice. I personally use SQLite in digikam, but I don't know really well the differences between that and MySQL. Maybe someone else can shed some light. Now start digikam, point at the location of the library. Wait until it finishes scanning (depending on the size of the library, it can take up to several hours), and then you can work on your library. In the main menu, I'd recommend you to sort your Albums by Folder, and your items by Creation date. To remove duplicates, you can use the "Similiarity" tool in digikam. For that, you first need to generate fingerprints, which can take a while. Once it finishes, click on "Find duplicates". And the possible duplicates will be listed in that panel. Now you have to review results one by one, deleting or moving duplicated entries. Another option which works well, is right clicking in any picture you suspect is duplicated, and choose "Find similar...". So now you can already enjoy your library. You'll likely want to add tags to your files, and maybe correct the date on some pictures, or add the geolocation to some pictures. Or even detect faces in them. Of course, at this point, any changes made to the library from digikam will also be visible to any other picture manager, they won't be lost. If you later wanted to use adobe Bridge, ACDSee, Picasa, or any other, you can. I hope I have been helpful! And I'd would appreciate some input if other users have some other tips for organizing their picture libraries. PS: of course, all the names and options I've mentioned will appear in Spanish in your digikam. Tell me if you can't find something or need some translation. -- Sent from: http://digikam.1695700.n4.nabble.com/digikam-users-f1735189.html |
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