Episode: 4071
Title: HPR4071: Migration to digiKam as Digital Asset Management (DAM)
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4071/hpr4071.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 19:15:39

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4171 from Monday 11th of March 2024.
Today's show is entitled Migration to Digicum as Digital Asset Management Dam.
It is the first show by Newhost Henrik Hemrin and is about 8 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
This summary is I describe how I migrated from Adobe Photoshop Elements.
Welcome to Hacker Public Radio.
My name is Henrik Hemrin and this is my premier as host at Hacker Public Radio.
I will talk about storage of digital photos and more specifically my migration from Adobe
Photoshop Elements to Digicum as Photo Catalog Software.
I use a Photo Catalog Software or DAM Digital Asset Management as it is often referred to.
I started with Photoshop Our Boom maybe same year or soon after I bought my first digital camera in 2004.
Photoshop Our Boom was a software that soon was incorporated into Adobe Photoshop Elements.
I have then purchased several releases of Photoshop Elements.
My latest and not unlikely the last purchase of Photoshop Elements was release 14 which I bought in 2015.
Which also was when I migrated from Windows to Mac OS.
Photoshop Elements is without hesitation a good software but one major drawback is that it is proprietary
and I cannot export data from it on my conditions.
After a few years geotagging stopped working in my Photoshop Elements 14.
The error message told that this was caused by a change from Google.
Adobe Photoshop Elements had the fix for this error but only incorporated in the next release of the software.
No fixed was planned for my release so to get geotagging working again I would have to buy a new release of Photoshop Elements.
This annoyed me.
I waited to buy and I used ordinary tags with the geographic information as a workaround for time being.
Over time I also got problem that it now and then crashed and needed to be restarted.
It started to happen more often.
It became more and more stressful and less attractive to work with my photos.
Something needed to be done.
I considered if I should buy a new release of Photoshop Elements or change to any other software.
At the same time I also became more attracted to Linux and I also became more interested in free and open software.
I was looking for a software possible available on all three platforms, Windows, MacOS and Linux.
Adobe products are not available for Linux nor are they free and open source.
So this rule out Photoshop Elements, Lightroom and Adobe and Photoshop from Adobe.
A big drawback with changing from something else than Adobe is that I most certainly will lose some of the work I've put into the photos in Photoshop Elements.
Firstly, the photo editing data and raw conversion settings for individual photos will be lost.
This is almost impossible to migrate between softwares.
What can be done is to save what I had edited as new photos of course.
And I'm fine with this. I will not stop me from changing software.
Secondly, it's about the metadata which is very important to me.
Metadata contains not only information about the shooting from the camera itself,
but also my tags, description, texts and more I have added in Photoshop Elements.
Metadata also includes face tagging.
This goes both for digital camera photos as well as digitized analog photos.
So my criteria for my new software, one, preferable free and open source, two,
available on multiple platforms, in particular available on Mac OS and Linux.
Three, that metadata can be migrated, including face tagging.
The one that I found to best meet my criteria is DigiCam.
DigiCam is mostly known for its catalog capabilities,
but DigiCam also includes import and export functions as well as raw conversion and photo editing.
So some words about my migration.
Photoshop Elements stores the data in a database.
It is possible to export metadata to files and side costs, but not all data.
Face tagging cannot be exported.
The name of the person can be exported, but not the coordinates on the face tag,
which is only stored in the database.
And the database itself cannot be read by other software, except by Adobe software.
Adobe Lightroom Classic can import the data from Photoshop Elements database directly into its own database.
This was very important for my migration success.
Lightroom has better export functions than Photoshop Elements and can export also face tagging.
So I installed Lightroom Classic, available for free trial for some days,
and exported the data from Photoshop Elements to Lightroom Classic.
I discovered an issue with the time and date stamps.
In Photoshop Elements, it's possible to give incomplete date and time.
For example, state only year if I don't know all the details.
Already, Lightroom had a problem to interpret this information correctly,
and I had to implement a work around with tags.
In general, several time and date attributes exist,
and it is something to understand what is what and how each of them is defined, displayed and managed in each software.
From Lightroom, I exported metadata, including face tags to files and sidecars.
Now I was prepared to migrate to DigiCam.
And migration to DigiCam worked, not 100% perfectly, but good enough.
I migrated one and a half year ago in October 2022.
I still have access to my Photoshop Elements database if I want to go back and check anything.
In November or December 2023, I took the next step to migrate from DigiCam on MacOS to DigiCam on Linux.
This migration was relatively easy.
My current settings in DigiCam is to always write data to sidecars
in addition to the DigiCam databases.
So I copied the photo files and the sidecars from MacOS to Linux,
and I took the opportunity to rearrange my folder structure,
and then I imported into DigiCam and DigiCam
built a new database in Linux based on photos and sidecars.
Thank you for listening, take care and goodbye.
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