First, I hate flatpak.

Second, I hate flatpak.

Third, all I want to do is set up exiftool in Digikam. I added a filesystem override so that Digikam can see my /home/david/bin folder. I copied exiftool into that folder. It is executable, and it is statically linked, so it doesn't need access to any libraries outside of /home/david/bin. I can execute it from a terminal window.

Digikam offers to let me install it. I click on Open Setup Dialog..., navigate to /home/daniel/bin, choose exiftool, and click the Open button. That takes me back to the Setup Dialog, but doesn't add exiftool.

Any help would be appreciated.

Fourth, I hate flatpak.

I have the same problem. Any luck with that?

I have same problem. I experimented a little with Flatseal to see if that would allow access but wasn't successful.
Why isn't exiftool included in the flatpak if the normal installation of exiftool is outside the sandbox?

Anyone come up with a workaround yet?

I am having the same problem. i cannot seem to add exiftool to digikam when I install with either flatpak or snap. I have configured the flatpak/snap permissions to be as permissive as possible and digikam does not recognize the exiftool package I have installed.

When I install using apt (I am on PopOS 22.04), I am able to get DigiKam to recognize the exiftool. Problem here is the ubuntu repo has an old version of digikam and I'd like to run the latest (7.8 as of September 2022) to take advantage of the .HEIC file type support improvements.

Did anyone ever solve the exiftool issues using either flatpak or snap?
Thank you

Edit 9/25/2022:
I have resolved the issue by using the KDE provided appimage install method. This provides the latest version of Digikam as well as the functioning exiftool. Yes, appimages are not as easy to update as other distribution methods, however it works.

Well, it looks like some efforts are being made to add exiftool as a part of flatpak, but all my tests were negative yet - https://github.com/flathub/org.kde.digikam/issues/44
I managed to build v7.9 from sourcecode, that appeared to be a very straightforward process, even on my old Debian 11 Stable.
And there I'm able to configure it to use exiftool.
So hoping that the above #44 will get eventually closed, I'll be keeping a close eye on it.
As I'm not a big fan of having software locally installed from the sourcecode to my machine - it's hard to get rid of all it's traces across filesystem, when you need to move on and uninstall it.