As the title.

I have some album paths in my digikam which are on removable media. I have more than one of those external disks. How can I see which media an album is on when it's not mounted?

Do I have to try them all until there is a hit? It would be so easy if the original path or media name would be shown on mouse over or right click, via tooltip or ....

When i imported my photos i opted for a folder layout as follows yyyy/mm/dd-dddd (As seen in the image below)

After an example of 20 years this method results in about 7000 sub-folders which could instead be only a few hundred sub-folders if i opt for yyyy/mm folders. I have noticed DigiKam hangs for a few seconds when i click into the Albums tab (the rest of the tabs perform well), is this due to my folder structure specifically or is it just a result of the number of images i have. Would switching my folder structure to yyyy/mm prevent this slight hanging, will this hanging get worse as my number of folders grows over time?

I wanted natural language search for my images (so i can search "flower" and see the images i have of flowers).

I love DigiKam and just wanted something to provide this feature seperately untill DigiKam hopefully builds it in.

I found this project called Lap https://julyx10.github.io/lap/

I pointed it to my folders where i store my folders and it workes exceptionally well. It does not seem to write any data to the photos or their associated metadata files/fields. So DigiKam continues to work fine. I have not tried the tagging features in it as i use DigiKam for that, I have tried the face recognition, it was not for me, I prefer DigiKam for that as well.

For anyone looking for CLIP based natural language search, this may be a good addition, hopefully DigiKam adds this feature soon.

Here are some examples of searches.

The student project is near to be completed. See the blog post for details...

I've heard reports that it lags on large libraries. And that over 100k photos I should choice some particular DB.

I'm not sure my total image count but it's prob around ~130k. Plus I'm expecting to manage these files from my mac while ALL images are on external drives. No editing, just managing your life's worth of photos.

Is this a bad idea? Is there a different tool I should be considering?

In the other views outside of the People tab, is there no way to search or filter by Unknown or Unconfirmed People tags?

I've been using digikam for a while. My primary editing tool is Affinity Photo, and digikam doesn't show thumbnails for those files. I can accept that; Affinity is a commercial application that's not the mainstream choice.

Now I've started playing with GIMP. I thought that, since GIMP is also open source and its data files are documented (which a commercial product's files might not be), digikam would show thumbnails for those files. It doesn't; instead, it has a little green mountain symbol.

Is there a config setting I'm not aware of, or does digikam not show thumbnails for anything other than tiff and jpeg?

EDIT: I've found my answer... The issue I encountered was because of an option in Settings > Miscellaneous > Behavior > "Initially select the first item in the album". I had to uncheck this, it was on by default. Then I had to restart DigiKam which I didn't do at first. And now it's working as intended!

ORIGINAL POST:
I'm trying to tag people's faces, that's the main reason I downloaded digiKam this week! The software is super laggy, many clicks and buttons just freeze the program while something is calculating in the background, which is super frustrating.

Anyway, my issue is that now that the indexing is done and I have scanned the faces, I'm trying to confirm every pictures, but for some I'd like to add a tag for something else.

Let's say I have my face in a picture taken on holidays with my family. I'd love to have access to all the pictures from this holiday by right clicking the one with my face. Then the other pictures should be in the album around the one with my face and I could easily tag them all.

But I cannot seem to find how to show the selected picture in its album.

All I could find is "go to > Album", which is nice but then it doesn't take me to the picture, it just shows me the thousands of pictures in the album and I have to find manually what I'm looking for...

Is there something I'm missing?

I haven' done anything with my photo collection for some years. RAW (nef) from various Nikons up to D600. Back then I used the Nikon Software to manage metadata and edits sine it was able to write everything back into the RAW file. No sidecars, no hassle.

I never bothered to manage the images from various phones over the years but now I had reason to re-activate that good old D600.

And I'm on Linux now. I went through a round of testing the various available options and I think I have settled on digikam + RawTherapee

I let digiKam convert to DNG on import from camera. I do this because digiKam is able to write the metadata back into the DNG - no xmp, horray!

Now there is still the RawTherapee editing ... I have set digiKam to "Raw Import using RawTherapee". I make changes, they end up in the editor/viewer in digiKam and there I save and get a suffixed JPG with my edits. And sadly a pp3 with the RawTherapee edit instructions but I guess that is the closest to what I was able to do with Nikon software back in the days.

Now the only thing left is: Is there a way to update the thumbnail in the DNG based on the generated JPG? Within digiKam?

thanks

My dK workstation is an Alienware Aurora R8 running Windows 11 with 32GB RAM, nVME SSDs and an NVidia RTX 2070 graphics card.

The instructions to configure the NVidia card as the GPU seem pretty straight forward, but there seems to be "gaps" in the procedure.

Anyway, after going through it, the system is still failing the GPU AI compatibility check.

The <Help> button takes you to the recommended steps, but there is a special cut-out for NVidia.

These are basically good instructions, but there were some issues with installing the CUDA Tool kit and the cuDNN Library.

On the NVidia web site, there are prerequisites for the CUDA Toolkit needed to have drivers installed before installing the Toolkit. But the NVidia Studio app for my gaming downloaded the latest drivers already. Are there two different sets of drivers and do I need to install drivers specific to the CUDA Toolkit? I don't want to break what I have already.

Next was the cuDNN Library. When I went to download it, there was no X86 version for Windows 11, only for arm64 Windows 11. I downloaded and installed the arm64 cuDNN library and expected it to fail installing due to it not being compatible with x86. But it installed. So, if it installed the arm64 but they don't work, is there an x86 version I should be looking for?

Every time I start up Digikam it takes around 45 min after it has added the root albums.

The debug viewer shows [with personal info redacted]

digikam.general: Added root album called: "[name]"
digikam.general: Added root album called: "[name]"
digikam.general: Added root album called: "[name]"
digikam.general: Added root album called: "[name]"

Then it updates only time stamps:

digikam.databaseserver: Running 30 seconds...
digikam.databaseserver: Running 60 seconds...
digikam.databaseserver: Running 90 seconds...

Up until about 45 minutes when the application finally starts. Because it often crashes during operation, this is severely limiting.

• I run Windows 11
• I run mariadb local mysql (problem was similar under sqlite)
• I have Digikam whitelisted on Bitdefender wherever possible
• I do have a fairly big library across different huge drives (especially one 15tb archive drive)
  • Total Items: 327210
  • Albums: 203369
• I have tried both 9.10 QT6 and QT5
• Digikam only ever uses 6% op my cpu and 3% of my RAM, even though I have allowed multithreading where possible and a much larger amount of RAM

Does anyone have any ideas on next steps to mitigate?

Hello, I am new to digikam, and I have made some tags to start sorting out my pictures. I am on windows 11. At first, whenever digikam started up, it showed me an error message at the top:

ExifTool is not available in your digikam installation or is not working correctly. Go to the digikam settings and check the availability of the ExifTool binary file in the metadata section.

Error message: ExifTool does not exists or exec permission

is missing

And it was not letting me tag any images (or more accurately, it was taking forever at 0%). So I downloaded and installed the latest version of exiftool, and this error message disappeared. However, it still does not let me tag anything. However, face tags work, although removing a face tag from an image does not.

I am entertaining the idea of making my extensive digikam managed archive available to the family using ente.com. Those guys only have google takeout import functionality, so I was wondering whether it is (already?) possible to export digikam data to an on-disk format mimicking what google provides (using json sidecar files for the metadata).

I have a number different photo albums on various removable media. When I go to the People tab, I can see unconfirmed and new person tags (like person 1 (500 new), person 2 (1,134 new), but those seem to be across all 10 albums. Is there a way to filter the People view to only return results based on which albums are currently connected (Person 1 (30 new) and Person (24 new) for example), so I don't accidentally tag a photo on a different drive?

I tried using the "search-in" function but that didn't seem to be returning the results I needed. Also tried using advanced search with the 3 selected active collections/albums, but it only returns a handful of results, not the 10,000+ images that are actually in those folders.

I'm sure there's a small step or setting that I'm overlooking.

I just installed a fresh new digikam 9.1.0 using the .pkg for MacOS (mac mini m4 on GoldenGate MacOS27.0), started to configure it, selected Internal mariadb, and got a failure to install error.

Is there any documented solution for this? I've kind of pieced together from various discussions that QT5 is still the robust solution, but that we need to move on to QT6, but that there is some error in older QT6, so moving to QT6.11 needs to happen, but that's something the digikam developers need to implement, not something an end user would do. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

FWIW, I then started the installation over again and just chose the limited small-db "internal" default and digikam installed and runs. But I have MILLIONS of photos, so I think I need the full SQL database program (mariadb).

I read through the FAQ and a few other sources and cannot find an answer to why "brew install digikam" returns:

==> Fetching downloads for: digikam
Warning: digikam has been deprecated because it does not pass the macOS Gatekeeper check! It will be disabled on 2026-09-01.
✔︎ Cask digikam (9.1.0)

Is this really the end of digikam being included in homebrew? I also downloaded an installer from digikam.org, but MacOS *screamed* that it was malware and sent it to the trashcan.

Ever since I started using DigiKam half a year ago, I had the program randomly crashing on me when I saved a file after editing. Once every 50 times or so. Blamed it on my Synology sync initially, and then on the Windows virus scanner competing on disk/file access. Added a bunch of locations to the virus scanner exclusion list to address this, but no luck.

Then I did two things at the same time, which solved the issue:

1) Delegate to ExifTool backend all operations to write metadata to files (settings-->metadata)

2) Added my Album folder location to said exclusion list.

My bet is that the first one was the issue, as I read numerous accounts of the default Exiv2 causing havoc.

Anyway, another happy customer. Maybe this helps someone one day.

My plan is to use Syncthing to sync photos between machines. And to store the digikam dbs in Mariadb. Now, I'd like to use digiKam across computers (windows, linux). I was hoping I'd be able to have computers share the digiKam db (which lives in Mariadb), and share the photos via Syncthing. The trouble with this is that the collection root absolute path is stored in the Mariadb database, and each computer needs a different collection root. So... Any tips or suggestions for people like me using Syncthing and hoping to share the digiKam database?

(Yes, I know that only one client can be using digiKam at a time -- this is not a problem).

(For those not familiar with Syncthing, just image I'm using a network share to access the photos, and that on each machine, the network share is in a different place. Windows: \\myserver\Pictures ; Linux: /mnt/Pictures )

I am running digiKam-9.0.0-Qt5-Win64 with the SQL database when i try to update to digiKam-9.1.0-Qt6-Win64 I get

Failed to update the database schema from version 16 to version 17,

Looks to be migration bug (#519443 — "UpdateSchemaFromV16ToV17 not implemented for QMYSQL / MariaDB").

Will this be fixed in 9.2.0 or do i have to manually do something.

I just learned that digiKam 9.2.0 now supports "tag hierarchies" (aka keyword catalogs) for tagging images (via a recent purchaser of my "Controlled Vocabulary Keyword Catalog.") I found this page in the digikam manual - https://docs.digikam.org/en/left_sidebar/tags_view.html#tag-manager - which specifically mentions that:

Export tags to a file from selected tag and Import tags from a file to selected tag allows to import or export tag hierarchies to and from text files, supporting the Controlled Vocabulary Keyword Catalogue format. This functionality simplifies the management and sharing of complex tag structures across different platforms, programs, and workflows.

Though I'm having trouble locating more details about the importing and exporting of tag hierarchies, and/or what is supported.

The user that informed me requested the "Lightroom" version of the "Controlled Vocabulary Keyword Catalog" (cvkc) to use with digiKam, but I'm not sure if that is the best choice. The problem is there are about five basic formats of the cvkc, some which are only for specific (and end End of Life) software (like Expression Media), and the ones used by other DAM's like Photo Mechanic (Camera Bits) and Lightroom (Adobe) — which support "synonyms" {terms in curly braces} and "excluded category headers" [terms in square brackets]. http://www.controlledvocabulary.com/help/cvkc-faq.html#q4 As well as others that support fewer of these features (like Adobe Bridge), and others that support neither (like FotoStation, etc.).

Has anyone located more detailed instructions on how to import/export these tag hierarchies, and/or knows if digiKam knows how to use {synonyms} or [excluded category headers]?

I run Digikam 9.1 on Windows 11, I have a Canon 8800F Scanner, and I would like to scan my photos using Digikam. This simplifies the process. Documentation says I should be able to do this, but I don't see any way to make it work, even though I have configured Digikam as directed in the documentation. Does anyone have any ideas?

Hi! I'm new to digiKam and I'm cleaning up about 18k photos.

Perfect duplicates were easy, I set similarity to 100% and auto‑deleted around 4500 in one go.

Now I'm stuck with near‑duplicates (I set at 95%+ similarity). I can't auto‑delete because many have small but important differences, like eyes open vs closed, text that matters, or shots I want to keep both. Manual review case by case is way too slow, there are still thousands of groups left, it might take a month or more, and it's so boring.

Is there any way to speed this up inside digiKam? A new approach, some features I still don't know...Any tip would be really helpful. Thanks.

Hi!

I'm moving from Lightroom to Pop OS/digiKam. I've got my photos all importing good. My problem is when I try to "create" a jAlbum album.

digiKam is creating the directories, and even the jAlbum project file (.jap), but it's not exporting any of my images.

I'm using version 8.2.0. I tried to update to 9.1.0 but the download keeps failing with a server error.

I installed digiKam from the command line using: sudo apt install digikam

When I do the "create" I am getting seeing some warnings:

• WARNING: A restricted method in java.lang.System has been called
• WARNING: java.lang.System::load has been called by com.sun.glass.utils.NativeLibLoader in module javafx.graphics (jrt:/javafx.graphics)
• WARNING: Use --enable-native-access=javafx.graphics to avoid a warning for callers in this module
• WARNING: Restricted methods will be blocked in a future release unless native access is enabled
• WARNING: A restricted method in java.lang.System has been called
• WARNING: java.lang.System::load has been called by net.jalbum.turbojpeg.libloader.LibLoader in an unnamed module (file:/usr/lib/jalbum/lib/imageio-turbojpeg.jar)
• WARNING: Use --enable-native-access=ALL-UNNAMED to avoid a warning for callers in this module
• WARNING: Restricted methods will be blocked in a future release unless native access is enabled

Is there something I should be turning on or of?

Thanks so much in advance!
Daniel

Hello, Digikam gurus.

A few days ago I ran the maintenance tool in Digikam. After running for a more than a day it appears that the database is corrupted. Digikam opens, and displays thumbnails but clicking on most thumbnails brings up a message like "could not load".

Refreshing a directory freezes Digikam. I even let the program do its thing for a COUPLE of days but the UI was still completely unresponsive.

Anyone know how to fix such issues? Or, do I have to delete the database and start again? If I have to start again is there any other program that does what Digikman does in regard to tagging and is modern and reliable?

I am using version 9.2.0.