[digiKam-users] Writing tags to PEF and ARW files

[mmjoshi]

I have hundreds of files in Pentax PEF and Sony ARW. I have tagged them in
digiKam with a hierarchy of tags. I do see xmp files generated for each of
these files. However, if I check with ExifTool I do not see the tag
information in the XMP files. In the digiKam settings I have selected the
option Write to sidecar files with "Write to XMP sidecar for read-only item
only" sub option.

I also tried selecting all the images and using the Tag manager "Write Tags
from Database to Image" option. The tag information is still missing in
ExifTool and the timestamp on the XMP files also does not change indicating
no change was made to these files.

Tried searching the knowledge base but did not find anything that would
help.

Am I doing something wrong?



--
Sent from: http://digikam.1695700.n4.nabble.com/digikam-users-f1735189.html

[Remco Viëtor]

On dimanche 20 décembre 2020 07:13:06 CET mmjoshi wrote:

> I have hundreds of files in Pentax PEF and Sony ARW. I have tagged them in
> digiKam with a hierarchy of tags. I do see xmp files generated for each of
> these files. However, if I check with ExifTool I do not see the tag
> information in the XMP files. In the digiKam settings I have selected the
> option Write to sidecar files with "Write to XMP sidecar for read-only item
> only" sub option.
>
> I also tried selecting all the images and using the Tag manager "Write Tags
> from Database to Image" option. The tag information is still missing in
> ExifTool and the timestamp on the XMP files also does not change indicating
> no change was made to these files.
>
> Tried searching the knowledge base but did not find anything that would
> help.
>
> Am I doing something wrong?

Tags can be stored in a number of fields, why not have a look at the XMP file
directly with a text editor? it is basically nothing more than formatted plain
text, no binary codes involved.

Remco

[mmjoshi]

Remco Viëtor wrote
> Tags can be stored in a number of fields, why not have a look at the XMP
> file
> directly with a text editor? it is basically nothing more than formatted
> plain
> text, no binary codes involved.
>
> Remco

Thanks for the tip!

I did some further investigation. Some files with the xmp extension are text
files and they contain the correct tags in text format. ExifdTool also can
read them. However, other xmp files are in binary format! They do not
contain the tags nor can ExifTool read those tags.

Another interesting thing I noticed. All the PEF files have the XMP file
name in the format filename.xmp. However for the ARW files, some XMP files
have the format filename.xmp and rest of the XMP files have the filenames in
the format filename.arw.xmp! Why this difference? I hope I am making myself
clear!!

Anyway, is there a way to clean this up? Delete all the XMP files and
regenerate them by writing tags from the database? Since the number is huge,
obviously this needs to be a batch operation.



--
Sent from: http://digikam.1695700.n4.nabble.com/digikam-users-f1735189.html