Re: How Hierarchial Tags Work

Posted by Flying fox on Jul 24, 2021; 10:05pm
URL: http://digikam.185.s1.nabble.com/digiKam-users-How-Hierarchial-Tags-Work-tp4705208p4717505.html

Hey

Recently I introduced digiKam for managing my photos.

Via the previous package (Synology Photo Station) I had already provided a certain simple (maximum 2 levels) folder structure and I mainly invested in tagging the photos (without hierarchy). Via Photo Station I had the possibility to add location description (by this I don't mean geotagging with the coordinates, which I also did in addition to the description). However, this info was not written in the metadata of the photos but in a database on the NAS

With digiKam I want to make work to add the location description to the metadata of the photos.

When working out how I would do this, I came up with a tag hierarchy. The principle seems logical to me, but since I only had limited knowledge of photo metedata, I wanted to take a closer look at this. I have learned a lot of things and I think I can go for it, but I can't find an answer to one particular question yet.

In all the articles I've read the hierarchy is explained with some examples and like in this thread root tags like "Location" or "WHERE" are used to indicate that there are underlying locations like countries, cities, buildings, . .. are listed.

One of the strengths of the hierarchy is that when you designate a child tag, you can automatically include parent tags as well. Fine, but if I follow this all the way to the root tag, then the "Location" or "WHERE" tag will also be added as a tag and will also be displayed as a tag. I understand that it is included in the hierarchy in the XMP, but that it is displayed is less logical to me (the only thing it could say is that there may be a location description present).

In Peter Albrecht's example in this thread, the tags "Places in my hometown" and "Other cities" would also be included as separate tags.

I would think there should be a distinction somewhere between tags that serve to create the hierarchy and tags that are elements of that hierarchy. During my search for info about tag hierarchy I thought I read that Adobe Lightroom has something for this. Does this mean that this is common use and can often be done in other applications or is it just an option that is in line with my thoughts?

I would like to ask you what your thoughts and experiences are with this.

Thank you for your feedback! :-)