Digikam

Useful settings

Collections -> Ignored Directories -> #recycle (for synology)

Metatdata -> Behaviour -> Use Lazy Synchornization: makes you confirm the changes before writing them below. Useful when working on lots of pictures (eg face recognition)

Metatdata -> Behaviour -> Face tags + geolocation information on

Metadata -> Sidecars -> write and read on.

Miscellaneous -> Behaviour -> Scan for new items at startup, fast scan, detect faces in newly added images. Fast scan will not detect items changed in external programs.

Miscellaneous -> Behaviour -> Initially select the first item in the album

On the bottom right, to the left of the zoom level, there is a little triangle with a status bar when digikam is operating. Press the triangle to see what it is doing.

Faces

In the preview you can select show face tags on and off in the top left of the preview picture

To remove a face, right click on a picture, remove tag and then select the person to remove

You can make a face a thumbnail by right clicking on a face in the People tab

You can see all the faces of a person in the people tab. You can see the whole picture in the Tags tab under People

To no longer scan for a person, you can right click the person in the People view, click Unmark tag as face, continue, but BE CAREFUL do NOT remove the tag corresponding to this face tag from the images! (so answer NO) You will then be able to find the tag still in the Tags list, but no longer in the people view.

To reset the training data (If you have edited a faces collection and removed people that don't belong), Tools -> Maintenance -> (Albums) -> face Engine management -> rebuild all training data

When scanning a large collection start with larger faces and high detection accuracy. Then scale it down and rescan, otherwise the amounts of hits will be huge.

If you move a person from a suggestion to Unkown, it will not suggest that picture for that person again. If you move it to Ignored, that face will never be suggested again.

To scan ignored faces

By design, digiKam won’t scan “Ignored” faces. To rescan them, you have to move them back to Unknown from Ignored.

Just an idea, but you might want to create a custom tag, somthine like “Temp Ignored”, and apply it to all the ignored faces before you move them back to Unknown. After you rescan, you can filter the Unknown view in the left people sidebar for your custom tag to easily move any previously ignored faces back to Ignored. Once the images are moved back to Ignored, I suggest you delete the custom tag, which will remove it from all the Ignored faces as well as any new matches.

The key point is to filter the “Unknown” people view with your custom tag after you run face recognition. If you use any other view it will include the newly tagged images, which means you’ll move both Unknown and new tagged images back to Ignored.

Maintenance

Tools -> Maintenance -> Perform Database Cleaning

This should be done periodically to ensure everything is up to date and compresses the database. Digikam will stop responding during this cleaning as it doesn't want any conflicting inputs. This can take a long time!