Hi,

I recently updated digiKam on my Debian system from v4.x to v5.3. After the update no albums were displayed. digiKam also complained about not being able to connect the database. I configured it to use the existing sqlite database file and added the root path of my repository as collection. This kind of worked, after indexing the albums appeared and metadata (labels, ratings, ...) for JEPG files was shown (apparently rebuilt from xmp files?), however the metadata for RAW files was lost.

I tinkered a bit in the sqlite database and found that it now contains two entries for each image, the previously existing one and a new one. The metadata of (some) RAW files was still available in the database and I made some efforts with scripting trying to recover it, but abandoned it since it was only available for some files. Instead I went back to a somewhat older version of the database.

With the uncorrupted database I didn't repeat the error of re-adding the root path of my repo as collection. Instead I had a look at the albumroots table in the database. In the old database "identifier" is "volumeid:?path=%2Fdata%2Ffotos", in the new one (after re-adding the colection) "volumeid:?path=/data/fotos". Before opening digiKam I updated the "identifier" to the latter path. With that digiKam sees the albums and the pre-backup metadata for RAW files is available.

Needless to say that I'm not excited about losing the metadata and spending hours trying to recover it Hopefully the provided information can help to spare others the pain. Also the issue would have been less severe if digiKam would import metadata from .xmp files of RAW files as it seemingly does for JPEG.