Firstly, apologies if this has been asked before, but I can't seem to find anyone else online with this EXACT issue.

I have 60 folders of photos that I am tagging in DigiKam. So far I have completed 15 folders with no hiccups, all tags I have created for each photo have been written to metadata and I can read these tags using software such as exiftool. I have just finished my 16th folder, which has all of my photos tagged in DigiKam, so obviously on the database, but none of these tags have written to the metadata (I should have known there was a problem when there was no processing time taken to write tags to the photos). This is only a small folder, about 1500 photos, compared to my largest of over 10,000 which still worked fine.

To preempt a few questions:

- Yes, I am writing directly to metadata, not to XMP sidecars
- Yes, I have tried clicking "More" and then "Write metadata to each file"
- Yes, I have tried creating a new tag that I apply to all files in the folder and then also trying the above step with that
- Yes, when I move to a new folder, DigiKam writes my tags to the metadata as it has so far for every other file

So, bearing that in mind, is there something I can do about this that I haven't considered? Is this just an issue with the one folder that I will have to overwrite and set up new tags for? If this is the case, can I migrate the tags I have written for these 1500 photos to a new folder containing the same photos (but obviously just a copy of them)?

Thanks in advance.

Update: it seems like there is an issue with the file permissions in a bunch of my folders, with a lot of them set to "r" rather than "rw". Unchecking from "read only" using the Windows "Properties" seems to be the fix.