DigiKam on MacOS works only in some cases; not with big USB drive

Help
,
1

DigiKam on MacOS Sonoma (patched current) fails for my User, where I told DigiKam the Photos are on a USB-connected large “spinning rust” HDD. It seems OK if the Photos are in the User’s folder (for a different User and DigiKam’s Photos location set to the User’s Pictures folder), but not for me, as I have about 10,000 photos and videos on a 2 TB USB-mounted drive formatted FAT32, and attempting to start DigiKam gets a brief “flash” of the startup screens, then everything stops.

Is there a fix or workaround, or do I need to uninstall and reinstall (because I can’t go to the setup/options in DigiKam because it doesn’t run)?

It seems to me there are several other cases of exactly this issue, based on a WWW search of the obvious keywords.

Also, I can’t find the recently-announced Guided Posting feature/process, so I don’t have much confidence I am posting in the best location; please advise me and I will re-post in the recommended place and you can delete this post.

Thanks for any help.

Jim

2

Today, seeing no replies to my request, I tried harder to fix my setup and/or gather more info for the Community. Here is what I did, which failed and I’m getting the same symptoms as before, which says to me the the normal Uninstall process does not work for DigiKam; there must be something left from my original setup which keeps the First Run from seeing a “clean slate” and therefore going into “initial setup”:

Made sure no apps are running.

Using Finder, went to the Applications folder
Moved to Trash
digikam.app
showfoto.app

Double-clicked digiKam-8.4.0-Qt5-MacOS-x86_64.pkg I saved a few days ago
(This installer worked before, giving me the DigiKam app I could set up.)

The Installer says it completed successfully.

Using Finder, went to the Applications folder
Double-clicked digikam.app

DigiKam “Loading tools” window opens, seems to do stuff, then closes.

Welcome screen opens, then on top of it “Download required files” opens.

After about a half-second,everything DigiKam vanishes

Problem Report

digikam quit unexpectedly.

====> Should I send the Full Report to someone?

Translated Report (Full Report Below)

Process: digikam [3133]
Path: /Applications/digiKam.org/digikam.app/Contents/MacOS/digikam
Identifier: org.digiKam
Version: 8.4.0 (8.4.0)
Code Type: X86-64 (Translated)
Parent Process: launchd [1]
User ID: 501

Date/Time: 2024-09-20 12:10:29.7692 -0500
OS Version: macOS 14.5 (23F79)
Report Version: 12
Anonymous UUID: D64460D1-2DDC-8F55-0676-F67B85793168

Time Awake Since Boot: 3500 seconds

System Integrity Protection: enabled

Notes:
PC register does not match crashing frame (0x0 vs 0x14766C175)

Crashed Thread: 14 Digikam::ScanController

Exception Type: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV)
Exception Codes: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x0000000000000007
Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000001, 0x0000000000000007

Termination Reason: Namespace SIGNAL, Code 11 Segmentation fault: 11
Terminating Process: exc handler [3133]

VM Region Info: 0x7 is not in any region. Bytes before following region: 4333297657
REGION TYPE START - END [ VSIZE] PRT/MAX SHRMOD REGION DETAIL
UNUSED SPACE AT START
—>
__TEXT 10248e000-10249e000 [ 64K] r-x/r-x SM=COW /Applications/digiKam.org/digikam.app/Contents/MacOS/digikam

Error Formulating Crash Report:
PC register does not match crashing frame (0x0 vs 0x14766C175)

Thread 0:: CrBrowserMain Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread
0 ??? 0x7ff8a21d6a78 ???
1 libsystem_kernel.dylib 0x7ff811ef43ce mach_msg2_trap + 10
2 libsystem_kernel.dylib 0x7ff811f02c88 mach_msg2_internal + 84