Hi,
I’m having problems with digikam and looking for help.
When I start digikam, it shows me a box that says “ExifTool is not available in your digiKam installation or is not working correctly. Go to the digiKam settings […]”. However, if I go to Settings > Configure digiKam, nothing happens before a long time, and before long my host says digikam is not responding, with the options to Wait or Force Quit. I’ve tried repeatedly Wait’ing it out, up to about 5 minutes’ worth, and still nothing happens that’s visible to me. I haven’t to my knowledge installed or updated digikam or exiftool, but it’s possible I accepted a change without noticing.
This affects only my own personal login. If I make a new user account, and launch from there, digikam loads without the notice, can open the settings menus, and in the metadata section shows it can find (the expected) exiftool binary. So probably there is something about my personal setup (dotfiles, config files, gnome settings and/or extensions) that fouls things up. That’s my most promising lead, but I don’t know how to proceed toward a diagnosis or a solution.
This is happening to me on two machines, one running nixos and one running ubuntu. I’ll dump as much info about both as I imagine to be useful, about both machines, in case that helps. I think it’s clearer to only focus on one per post, so let’s say this one is about the nixos system. On the off chance that both have the same solution, I’ll start with just this one post, but let me know and I’ll make another one for the ubuntu system.
ubuntu
ubuntu host has digikam installed via apt, with 4:8.2.0-0ubuntu6.2 (digikam -v gives digikam 8.2.0). So it doesn’t have commit eda2cf81b7 and doesn’t actually show the “ExifTool is not available” text. I’d been using it for a few months successfully, and it was embedding metadata into files. At some point in the past few months, triggering lazy synchronization stopped writing metadata into files, but didn’t report failures. but opening settings makes digikam nonresponsive. Since it was working for a while, if my personal setup is the problem, it’s probably something recent. But not all that stuff is versioned or easily reversible so I don’t know how to investigate that. On this host exiftool is in a conventional location
for bin in $( which -a exiftool ); do ver=$( "$bin" -ver ); printf "%s -> %s\n" "$bin" "$ver" ; done
/usr/bin/exiftool -> 12.76
/bin/exiftool -> 12.76
I tried blowing away all digikam stuff I could find in my homedir (rm -rf .cache/digikam .config/digikam_systemrc .config/digikamrc .local/share/digikam .local/state/digikamstaterc) and it didn’t change the outcome.
i created a new user and it’s able to open digikam, and in digikam can open setttings, where it shows that it can find exiftool and identifies it as version 12.76.
nixos
i’m setting up another host to try nixos. it runs a flake on nixos-25.05, with GNOME. i installed digikam in an early generation, and it worked fine at the start. i was testing every few generations that digikam still loaded and could open settings. but i started making many changes at once, so i don’t know when it stopped working and so it’s hard to guess the cause. What’s installed is digikam 8.6.0. For my personal user, startup gives the “ExifTool is not available” message, and opening Configure digiKam makes it nonresponsive.
On this host, exiftool is in my path at an unconventional place:
for bin in $( which -a exiftool ); do ver=$( "$bin" -ver ); printf "%s -> %s\n" "$bin" "$ver" ; done
/run/current-system/sw/bin/exiftool -> 13.25
That’s apparently a feature not a bug, as nixos should be having digikam use an exiftool distributed in the digikam package, unless my configuration does something that would void the hermetic isolation that makes up the nixos hype.
Either way, a new user with no personalization is able to open digikam settings, and the metadata panel there reports exiftool 13.25 is available.
Going back to the first generation that installed digikam, it no longer works. This is a 2nd thing that suggests to me it’s something about my personal environment.