Does Digicam copy photos or reference them only

Posted by carusoswi on Nov 26, 2020; 8:36pm
URL: http://digikam.185.s1.nabble.com/Does-Digicam-copy-photos-or-reference-them-only-tp4714390.html

New to this forum and to Digikam.  The photos I seek to organize reside in various locations (local hard drives, external drives, camera memory cards, etc.).  I thought I would start with the local/external drives and use the existing file locations (directories) as my album locations.  Is this a good or bad idea?  A couple of tests seem to indicate that Digikam builds albums using these direcories without altering the files, but before I treat my entire collection of photos in this manner, I would like to make certain.  Organizationally, are there disadvantages to my approach?  The directory names would be acceptable as album names for my purposes.

Your thoughts appreciated.

Caruso