Problems migrating from Lightroom 6 to Digikam

Help
1

I am very new to Digikam. In fact, I am still in the process of trying to set it up. I have been using Lightroom 6 (desktop version) for many years. I have nearly 88,000 items (mostly photos and only 139 videos). I photograph mostly nature and have a huge number of hierarchical tags (keywords in Lightroom) to support taxonomy. I just bought a new camera and decided it was about time to switch software, too. After some searching, I decided Digikam is the best fit for me. I found an article on migrating from Lightroom to Digikam, and followed the instructions (except for videos, which I will do later). This included saving all Lightroom metadata to files (either to the JPEG files or as separate XMP files), and using “Read metadata from files” in Digikam.

Anyway, I have a number of significant problems:

  • The total number of items in Digikam is over 3,000 more than I have in Lightroom
  • The dates of some of the photos are incorrect. For example, I have some for this month when I have yet top import any.
  • There seem to be many mistakes in metadata. That is, equivalent searches in Digikam and Lightroom return very different results.

I would really appreciate any advice on how to properly migrate from Lightroom to Digikam.

Thanks in advance
Gee

3

I have fixed the problem with metadata. For anyone else who has this same issue, I had to do the following:

  • Open the Configure digiKam settings

  • Open the Sidecar tab

  • Tick both Read from sidecar files and Sidecar filenames are compatible with commercial programs.

  • Then Reread metadata from files.

I still have the problem with incorrect dates on some photos, but it appears they were all caused by Lightroom. Having a SQLite database to query was a huge help in tracking down these problems.