Display missing in some date views,

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I was working on Geolocating photos from January 2022. While saving after doing a reverse geocoding the central main display went empty. All efforts to get it back have failed. Is my database corrupt? If so what are my rescue options?

There are over 2000 photos for January 2022. The photos are still on the computer, I checked the directory where they are stored and they all appear to be there. If I go to Album view in the left side bar and select TBE\2022\Jan the thumbnails all display as normal. However the count shown next to Album names all say (0). Not only for 2022\January but for all Albums. At least for the TBE album and subalbums. Some, but not all, of other Albums on that drive have counts.

More symptoms: Going back to Date on the left sidebar, the counts shown incorrect. Example select 2023. It shows 180. The Calendar below show February 2025 and is grayed out, indicating no files. Below that in the lower left corner its say …(5075 item). Five thousand is what I expect. For the individual months some counts are good others are low. 2024 will not open and 2025 does not show. But I know there 2025 photos.

To be clear the main display in thumbnail mode is only messed up when left side bar Dates is selected, And then only for 2022 and later. Completely empty for Jan 2022 (should be over 2000). Missing items for all other months and later years.

On the Timeline tab the counts are all wrong. At least for years I have Geolocated (2025, 2024, 2023, and 2022).

I am running Digikam 8.5 from the AppImage download from Digikam site. The OS is Ubuntu 24.04. ITB SSD, 14TB hard drive, 32Gig RAM. Previously I had the Digikam Snap for Ubuntu running but it was only 8.2. I am not sure if it was a clean migration. There are approximate 180,000 items in the database
The database is SQLite and is located on an SSD. The photos are on a network share.

So far I have done the usual reboots and restarts with no luck. I have done the maintenance in Tools->Maintenance both Scan for new items and Perform database cleaning, no luck. I have not done rebuild Thumbnails because the thumbnails are there in Album view and Tags view.

I don’t know the internal structure of the Digikam databases. But if I had to guess I would say the table that maintains the counts is messed up. I don’t see anyway to reset those counts.

I have some tools for browsing SQLite databases on my Windows machine, so I can poke around if needed.

Any guidance would be appreciated.

Herb

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Hi @Herb_Smith,
There aren’t any tables in digiKam that just maintain counts. The counts are computed at run-time by counting the rows returned from various SQL queries.

It may be you have “Settings->Metadata->Behavior->Update file modification timestamp …” turned on, and when you changed the geolocation it also changed the date of the image.

Can you see if the images show up when you look at the date you added the geolocation data?

Cheers,
Mike

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Thanks for getting back to me.

It is my understanding that dates used for the Dates display from the left panel is the Date Taken (or maybe Date Created). But definitely not the Date Modified. And it certainly behaves as the Date Taken is being used.

I eventually “solved” the problem by exporting the database using the database migration tools. SQLite to SQLite in another location. I then saved the original and copied the new database back to the location of the database. Solved the issue but I lost a lot of work in Face Recognition. It only took about week to migrate and then rebuild the other databases, 186,000 photos.

You say the file counts are determined at run time by looking at returns from the SQL queries. Then something must have messing up those queries. Like some bad data or corrupt records.

The “Update File Modification timestamp” is turned on. My back up system use it to know when a photo has changed, and I want to keep all versions in the backup. I have been working like that since the recovery. I have modified DK timestamp of thousands of photos since then no issue. I have geo located those same photos also without any issue. I have never seen any geo location activity modify the DK timestamp or date taken.

Since I have moved on I can not test out things as the original problem is gone. I do recall looking at the involved photos in Albums view and not noticing anything strange. I think I would have noticed the date on the photos was changed. But then you never know.

It would be nice if there were tools for forcing re-indexing. And some more robust tools for fixings corruption. From my own experience SQLite is very robust and very solid. But when you have something as complex as DK I am sure it can get messed up on occasion.

Thanks for the reply. I appreciate your time.

Herb