I've spent the last couple of weeks captioning my vacation photos. As I took 1,600 its been quite an effort!

I've been doing this through Digikam, which in the KDE4 version writes captions entered through the Caption/Tags panel to the file as EXIF/ITPC/XMP metadata.

I suddenly noticed that at some point Digikam is no longer doing this! I've gotten through 200 additional pictures since it apparently stopped writing correctly.

I noticed when opening an picture I had recently captioned that Gwenview was no longer displaying the EXIF caption in the information panel (I had set it to do so) but was in files I had worked on earlier. A quick check in the Metadata plugin in Gwenview shows that this data is indeed absent. Digikam is still writing the caption to its database of course but this is useless outside of Digikam.

My only thought is that updating from KDE 4.3 RC2 to KDE 4.3 broke something.

You can use Digikam > Tools > Write metadata to images, to commit the metadata. I do not know why automatic writing was disabled, however you may wish to check Digikam > Settings > Configure Digikam > Metadata.

I ran Tools > Synchronize All Images with Database, and while Digikam says the command was successful and synchronization was made, no changes seem to have been written to any images.

I also checked Digikam > Settings > Configure Digikam > Metadata, nothing seems out of place.

Given that this appeared after the upgrade to 4.3 final, please file a bug at bugs.kde.org as this is a regression.