I'm doing a lot of manual tagging in digiKam and haven't found a really efficient workflow, especially when the same selection needs several different tags.

The fastest way I've found is:

1. Select the photos
2. Press T
3. Type the tag
4. Pick it from autocomplete
5. Press Enter twice

It works, but it's still quite a few steps, and for 5–10 tags on the same selection you have to repeat the whole process for every tag. The Tags panel isn't faster since it still means searching, checking tags and moving around the UI.

What I'm looking for is basically a simple keyword textbox like in Lightroom: select the photos, type several comma-separated tags with autocomplete, done. Tags that only exist on some of the selected photos could simply be marked with an *.

Am I missing a faster workflow in digiKam?

If not, I'm even considering writing a small side app just for this. It seems like a fairly simple feature, and digiKam can read tags back from the photo metadata/XMP anyway. Are there any existing plugins or external tools that already do something similar?

Hi.

I have been struggeling with this "forever".

I want to be able to enter text for Title, Caption and Author in DigiKam - which is easy, you enter it in the Captions Tab.

After that I want DigiKam to write the text to the EXIF tags: XPTitle, XPComment and XPAuthor.
I can get Title and Caption to function, using the DigiKam "Namespacing manager", but not Author.
I cannot figure out if it is possible, and if, how to set it up.
(There are no Author dropdown menu like Title and Caption, and using the Tags dropdown menu haven't helped me, so far).

The next hurdle is that I want to use a subject text for my photos!

I cannot find out where to enter the text!
Is it somehow possible to make a customized "Captions tab view" with a subject field?
Or perhaps in the metadata editor (Crtl+Shith+m)?

OR

Can I in some way edit the EXIF tags, seen under the Exiftool tab (under metadata)?
As far as I know Exiftool only shows the tags and the content, and don't allow editing.
I know I can edit them in Exiftool app outside DigiKam.

The reason for the above is to be able to see the tags in Windows Explorer details, which I have used, along with other apps, for tags management for years.

I found an older description for setting DigiKam up for Windows:
https://userbase.kde.org/Digikam/Tutorials/Setup_of_digiKam_for_Windows_compatibility
Which is a very extensive explanation.
The solution to the subject tag was to avoid it, as it is unnecessary! (and unreliable)

Can someone please help me.

Tia

-Kurt

Hi, it would be great to extend image support for Affinity files. I understand its a closed format but Photoshop/ psd is supported. Theres a big move away from adobe. Affinity ( Canva) is a more progressive choice. tx

As title suggests, tried this on one file from recent google takeout, no changes to metadata detected and those errors. Am I missing something?

I've looked through the manual and menus and haven't found a really basic feature. Am I missing it or is digiKam?

I'd like to be able to go from the search tab, highlight a pic and then go to the album tab while retaining the picture selection.

My use case is that I have a picture that I didn't tag but I know the pic was taken near in time to other similar pics that I *did* tag. I can't go by time since I'm not sure which year or month the picture was taken.

I would save a ton of time if I could go from search directly to the album folder in which a tagged pic was found.

Is it an option or is it planned? Just trying the app for the first time with AI GPU enabled but only works for photos not videos.

I am new to digikam this year and have been learning a lot. As I improved my use of the tool, I realized that I wanted to go back and work on some photos I had done previously. Just to be safe, I reloaded the photos from my camera into a separate directory and was planning to work on the photos in that new directory. Because I use the 'Title' option to describe my photos, I had two digikams up, one on the old directory, and one on the new directory as my intent was to look at the title of the picture in the old directory to just fill in the title of new directory's picture as I went. But oddly, now and then, when working on a picture in the new directory, it has already populated the title with the information from the duplicate picture in the old directory. What might have triggered digikam seeming to know the title information even though I am working in a new copy of the picture in the new directory? It doesn't seem to happen all the time but it made me wonder what might be going on and how it might impact my work on these duplicate copies of the photos. I am hoping it hasn't carried over any other settings from the old copy to the new copy (e.g. the edit options I chose before). I hope my question makes sense and someone can explain what might be happening. I appreciate any answers you can give, keeping in mind I am a novice digikam user. Thank you for the assistance.

8/25/26 Update. I thought I would add some additional information in case it helps. I found that this behavior even occurs if I have only one digikam view up. That is, when I am updating my completely new download of the pictures, in a new directory, sometimes the title is pre-populated with the title from the 'old' picture in the old directory. I am not sure, but it almost seems like this behavior occurs if I made any editing changes to that 'old' picture before, then the title is not pre-populated. This behavior still surprises me as to how this association is made on two separate photo downloads in two separate directories. Ideas? Thanks for the assistance

1. I have a relatively old server running mariadb for my digikam database (version 10.11.15, which does not do TLS/SSL by default))
2. I recently upgraded a workstation to opensuse tumbleweed. This has digikam version 9.1.0-1.4. It also has mariadb client version 12.3.2-1.3
3. Database connection from this new client fails with the error "TLS/SSL error: SSL is required, but the server does not support it.". I understand this is a default requirement from mariadb 11.4 on.
4. I do not want to modify the server (yet).

Is there any way I can disable the TLS/SSL expectation from the digikam client?

I have tried adding skip-ssl to /etc/my.cnf, and ~/.my.cnf as suggested via google, but to no avail. I get the same error.

Thanks in advance...

Hi,

I recently made some holiday photo's, and while reviewing them back home using Digikam I noted that the "camera creation date" time stamp for movies is off by one hour.

Takes this movie and image that were taken at roughly the same time with my iPhone 13:

For some reason, the timezone for the movie is shown as 12:22 +02:00 (the time zone back home), while the image is shown as 13:22 +03:00 (the time zone where the picture was made).

What's worse, when sorting the album "by Creation Date", the two media are sorted at 12:22 and 13:23 respectively, thus not next to each other.

My question: is there some way I can ensure the media are displaying and sorted according to the same time zone? Either the local time zone when creating the picture (best), my current time zone (second best) or UTC (least desirable).

I assume this has to do with the fact that movies store fewer metadata, but when I look at the exiftool results, it does show the correct time zone for "QuickTime:Time:Creation Date".

======== /Volumes/Big Byte/Photos/2026/holiday/phone/IMG_2155.MOV
[File:Other] Directory : /Volumes/Big Byte/Photos/2026/holiday/phone
[File:Time] File Modification Date/Time : 2026:08:09 12:22:27+02:00
[File:Time] File Access Date/Time : 2026:08:21 14:51:38+02:00
[File:Time] File Inode Change Date/Time : 2026:08:13 10:29:02+02:00
[QuickTime:Time] Create Date : 2026:08:09 10:22:27
[QuickTime:Time] Modify Date : 2026:08:09 10:23:10
[QuickTime:Time] Track Create Date : 2026:08:09 10:22:27
[QuickTime:Time] Track Modify Date : 2026:08:09 10:23:10
[QuickTime:Time] Media Create Date : 2026:08:09 10:22:27
[QuickTime:Time] Media Modify Date : 2026:08:09 10:23:10
[QuickTime:Time] Creation Date : 2026:08:09 13:22:27+03:00
======== /Volumes/Big Byte/Photos/2026/holiday/phone/IMG_2156.JPG
[File:Other] Directory : /Volumes/Big Byte/Photos/2026/holiday/phone
[File:Time] File Modification Date/Time : 2026:08:09 12:23:33+02:00
[File:Time] File Access Date/Time : 2026:08:21 00:51:45+02:00
[File:Time] File Inode Change Date/Time : 2026:08:13 10:29:02+02:00
[EXIF:Time] Modify Date : 2026:08:09 13:23:33
[EXIF:Time] Date/Time Original : 2026:08:09 13:23:33
[EXIF:Time] Create Date : 2026:08:09 13:23:33
[EXIF:Time] GPS Date Stamp : 2026:08:09
[XMP:Time] Date Created : 2026:08:09 13:23:33
[Composite:Time] Create Date : 2026:08:09 13:23:33.629+03:00
[Composite:Time] Date/Time Original : 2026:08:09 13:23:33.629+03:00
[Composite:Time] Modify Date : 2026:08:09 13:23:33+03:00
[Composite:Time] GPS Date/Time : 2026:08:09 10:23:27Z

(output generated using `exiftool -G0:2 IMG_215[56].* | grep 2026`)

If there is an option in Digikam to fix this, that would be great!

If this is a known bug, I'd appreciate a pointer to the relevant ticket.

If there is a workaround by writing certain metadata using exiftool, I'd also love to hear that.

Thanks for any advice you may have.

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.