I am in progress transitioning from Adobe Bridge/LR to Digikam for DAM and some other FOSS for editing. The vast majority of my photo collection has been rated using the 5 star rating system in Adobe.
I have noticed an inconsistency in how Digikam reads the metadata from my photos. I open a particular directory in Adobe Bridge and all images have ratings. I open the same directory in Digikam and some are rated, some are not.
I copied a few of the files into a test folder to do some tests to understand what is happening. I installed exiftool and exiv2 on my system and figured I would first check that these tools can read the Rating as I am seeing it in Adobe.
(“bad” = the file Digikam does not read the rating, “good” = digikam reads the rating)
ccc@thinkpad:~/Downloads$ exiftool IMG_7559bad.HEIC | grep Rating
Rating : 1
ccc@thinkpad:~/Downloads$ exiftool IMG_7570good.HEIC | grep Rating
Rating : 1
Exiftool reads the ratings properly for both files.
ccc@thinkpad:~/Downloads$ exiv2 -pa IMG_7570good.HEIC | grep Rating
Exif.Photo.ISOSpeedRatings Short 1 100
Xmp.xmp.Rating XmpText 1 1
ccc@thinkpad:~/Downloads$ exiv2 -pa IMG_7559bad.HEIC | grep Rating
Exif.Photo.ISOSpeedRatings Short 1 250
exiv2 does not read the rating properly for IMG_7559bad.HEIC
I believe Digikam favors exiv2 such that if exiv2 shows no rating, Digikam will show no rating EVEN when exiftool shows the file has a rating assigned.
TLDR: Does anyone have any solutions as to how I could configure Digikam to prefer exiftool when reading metadata?
I have looked extensively through the Settings -> Configure Digikam -> Metadata tab within Digikam, and while there may be something there I need to adjust, I have not been able to figure this out.
System info I am running Digikam 7.8.0 installed via the KDE provided appimage on PopOS 22.04. I have confirmed Digikam recognizes exiftool and the version included with the appimage is 12.44.
FWIW- I installed Digikam 8.0.0 in a VM running Ubuntu Development Branch (kinetic) and confirmed Digikam recognizes exiftool 12.44. Thus far, no changes included within Digikam 8.0.0 seem to resolve my problem.
Any help or pointers would be massivley appreciated. Transitioning my workflow from Adobe Bridge/LR to Digikam is a massive step forward in my transition to linux.