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)

Code: Select all

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.

Code: Select all

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 MG_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.