Hello!
I recently imported my pictures (many, very many) to a laptop running kubuntu 12.04 lts.
It seemed that gwenview and dolphin would be a great lightweight team to mange / organize them.
Don't want to use digikam or another libray based organizer ( i have my reasons) .
Give a rating or assigning a tag was very very easy. But then problems started
Editing or copying a file will lose the tags and ratings ... i could not believe this. Faith in kubuntu started fading.
This will probably have something to do with nepomuk [ the invisible library ] i found out.
Could somebody help me? Or should i drop the project ...
greetz, frans

If a tagged/commented/rated file is copied the copy won't have the tags/comments/ratings, if it is moved (not copied) then it retains it's tag/comment/rating. (Unless it is moved into a folder which has been excluded from indexing). Editing the file won't affect the existing meta-data unless the edited file is saved under a different name, or, saved in a non-indexed folder. If you symlink to a file that has meta-data the symlink won't inherit the meta-data.

At least that's how it's works in 4.11.2 - don't know for sure what version kubuntu 12.04 has -- 4.8?
Maybe somebody with the same version could confirm if that's how it worked then.

Thank you very much ... I was afraid so. Which means I will have to find another solution.
Luckily I only worked upon the first 600 of 48.040 pictures ... still feel bad that i wasted a whole day before I found out.
Regarding pictures, one never touches the original. Pictures that need editing are saved with different suffives, that reflect the work flow.
I have tried several photo managers by now, dolphin-gwenview-gimp seemed promising.
Back to work, searching the internet, maybe gnome/shotwell.
Bye, frans

metzman wrote:If a tagged/commented/rated file is copied the copy won't have the tags/comments/ratings, if it is moved (not copied) then it retains it's tag/comment/rating. (Unless it is moved into a folder which has been excluded from indexing). Editing the file won't affect the existing meta-data unless the edited file is saved under a different name, or, saved in a non-indexed folder. If you symlink to a file that has meta-data the symlink won't inherit the meta-data.

At least that's how it's works in 4.11.2 - don't know for sure what version kubuntu 12.04 has -- 4.8?
Maybe somebody with the same version could confirm if that's how it worked then.

I can confirm the behaviour noted by metzman - this is because the rating and comment metadata is not stored in the file itself, but instead in Nepomuk. Therefore the data is not portable outside the computer it is created on as well.

I do recall Digikam having an option to sync metadata to the files though - but i'm not sure if this included ratings/comments.

bcooksley wrote:I do recall Digikam having an option to sync metadata to the files though - but i'm not sure if this included ratings/comments.

It was tags only I believe. I briefly tried it during my "kubuntu 12.04 days", but didn't use the feature as digikam's tag structure is tree-like, which nepomuk doesn't support.

At the moment though syncing is broken and has been disabled in digikam due to changes in nepomuk.
There's a Proposed Idea here by Veaceslav Munteanu (Google Summer of Code Project) to update the digikam tag manager and reintroduce syncing with nepomuk.