digikam: sharing databases between Linux and Windows PCs

Help
1

Hi all. I’ve been using digikam for a while on Linux Mint, with my photos on my NAS and the four databases stored locally on the PC’s hard drive. I’m on digikam v9.1.0.

I have a Windows laptop and it would be great if I could use digikam there too, particularly when I’m away from home and I want to access my photos more intelligently than just browsing a File Explorer. (I have a VPN already set up, this question isn’t about that).

I asked an AI (fatal mistake) whether this was possible and it said Yes. It’s talked me through buying a mini-PC, installing proxmox, making a mariadb container, migrating the databases (to MySQL server on mariadb) and reconfiguring digikam on Linux Mint to point at mariadb instead of the local copy. So far so good, but nothing I didn’t have before in terms of digikam functionality.

Then we came to getting it running on Windows. The bit I actually wanted. Installation was easy. But then the problems started. Can Linux and Windows actually share the databases? The sticking point seems to be the paths. Linux uses /media/photos and Windows uses Y:\ (or //192.168.xxx.xxx/photos). After messing about for a while the AI has now decided it may not be possible and suggested we “leave it for today”.

So I’m ££££ down, I’ve spent hours on this already, and the bit I really wanted to work doesn’t. Can anyone tell me definitively whether what I’m trying to do is possible? It doesn’t feel like a massive ask, but what do I know??

Thanks for any help you can offer.

2

The docs imply that they can’t:

The kind of resources shared on the local network do not permit the use of multiple clients at the same time with a common database.

However, you can have multiple clients using the same shared collection (even if the mount paths are different), each with its own database.

3

Thank you. This is what I’ve ended up with on the Linux PC. Is this what you meant?

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4

Also, are the icons documented somewhere? As well as the tick and the paperclip in my image, I’ve seen a kind of “recycle” icon and one I couldn’t really make any sense of. A search in the documentation didn’t bring up anything obvious. Thanks again.

5

I think the idea is you’d have just one location configured on each machine (with a different path according to how that machine is set up to access the NAS).

Couldn’t find anything about this, sorry, but maybe someone with deeper Digikam knowledge knows more!

6

As far as I can see, the Collection Settings are shared between the two PCs, so you can’t have one path on the Windows PC and another path on the Linux PC. What you can do is add both paths (and they appear on both machines with the paperclip icon), and then the one that’s actually being used by that PC appears again (automatically, no input from me) with the tick icon. So in my image, which is from the Linux PC, /media/photo appears a second time with a tick icon, because /media/photo is the path the Linux PC has chosen to use. Possibly total nonsense but it makes sense in my head…

7

They’re shared if you share the same database between the two PCs, which is what the docs recommend against.

The recommended setup is a unique DB per machine.

Each client will mount the shared collection to different paths on the client’s local computer, and this allows each host to have a unique database with all paths referring to the same main shared collection.

8

In this instance, does that mean you’d have to, for example, process all the faces twice ie once on each PC?

9

I’d assume so, from what I know of Digikam.