I’ve been using digiKam to go through my pictures to organize and tag them. However, I would like to verify that the tag data are actually being written to the jpg file and not just to the digiKam settings or whatever it would be.
My concern popped up when I edited a photo in digiKam. I added some tags and thought I was good to go. However, when I opened the same photo in Gwenview and Picasa3, neither program recognized it as having any tags at all.
Is this normal? I’m pretty new to managing photo collections, but I thought tag data were written to the files themselves. Therefore, any program that can read the metadata should have those same tags listed. Is this not how it works? Or is digiKam just a faulty application?
I’m trying to identify which program, if any, has the problem, but I’m not sure where to look.
My goal is to edit the metadata of each picture and then be able to open them with any photo management software in the future and all of my tags, geotags, comments, etc. are still there.
This page seems to suggest that digikam does write to the picture’s metadata, although whether it’s working properly or completely implemented I have no idea. Perhaps you can examine the EXIF data of the picture to see if it’s being updated.
Thank you for your help. I found out that I don’t have jhead installed, but was able to find the information using digiKam anyway.
I selected a photo and found a “Metadata” tab on the right. Selecting this brought up 4 tabs: EXIF, Makernote, IPTC, and XMP. Beneath each tab there is a Simple and Detailed view. I could see that my tags were not present in the simple or detailed view of any of the four formats. As I suspected, digiKam uses its own database to store the tags, but doesn’t write them to the file’s metadata by default.
What’s awesome, however, is I found that this can be changed in digiKam’s settings. Go to the following path:
Settings -> Configure digiKam -> Metadata
Check the box next to Save image tags as “Keywords” tag. This didn’t automatically save the tags that I had previously edited to metadata, but when I went back to those photos and unchecked and rechecked one of the tags and clicked Apply, all the changes were written to the metadata.
As near as I can figger, looking at the four tabs, it doesn’t seem to save keywords to EXIF or Makernote, but it did for IPTC and XMP. Maybe EXIF doesn’t support keywords or tags, or maybe I’m just reading it wrong. Either way, the keywords showed up in both Picasa and Gwenview.
Side note: Gwenview listed the IPTC keywords, but didn’t have anything in the “Tags” field. Maybe, like digiKam, this field is for Gwenviews internal database.
You don’t have to re-check the tags manually. Once the above mentioned setting is activated, in the Caption/Tags pane or sidebar or dock or whatever the More dropdown at the bottom, featuring the command “write metadata to each file” actually does what it’s suggesting. I guess it only updates digiKams database otherwise.
This is a real sucker! digiKam should warn the user that it actually stores the metadata somewhere else…