r/digiKam

Hi everyone,

I would really like to use digiKam as my standard software for managing my entire photo collection. I’ve been looking for a professional photo management solution, and digiKam looks very promising. I actually want to like it and use it.

Unfortunately, I’m currently struggling with one major problem: digiKam is extremely slow to start.

When I launch the program, it takes around 30 seconds before I see any sign of life at all. Then I have to wait approximately 30 minutes before the actual program window appears.

After that, the collections are visible, but the actual contents are still missing. I can see the collection structure, but there are no images available to work with. It seems that digiKam is still doing something in the background.

For me, this is difficult to understand, especially for professional software.

I completely understand that digiKam may need to perform a lot of work when it is first introduced to a large photo collection — scanning folders, creating or updating the database, reading metadata, generating thumbnails, etc. That's not a problem in itself.

What I don't understand is why I apparently cannot use the application while this is happening.

If a database needs several hours to be built or updated, I would expect the application to start normally and perform this work in the background. I should be able to browse existing images, configure the application, and continue working while the indexing process runs.

Instead, it currently feels as if the entire application is effectively blocked until digiKam has finished whatever it is doing.

My photo collection is fairly large, but this isn't an unusual scenario for professional photo-management software. I'm using a modern Windows PC with an RTX 5070 Ti and 96 GB RAM, so I don't think the hardware itself should be the primary problem.

I also want to make clear that I'm not looking for another photo-management application. I would genuinely prefer to get digiKam working properly because I like the concept and the functionality it offers.

So my questions are:

• Has anyone experienced a similar startup time of 20–30 minutes?
• Is there a particular database configuration that can cause this?
• Could digiKam be rebuilding or checking the entire database every time it starts?
• Is there a recommended way to import a very large existing photo collection?
• Are there settings I should change regarding thumbnails, database maintenance, indexing, or scanning?
• Is it possible to let digiKam start normally while the initial scanning/indexing continues in the background?
• Could this be caused by the fact that my collection is spread across a large number of folders/drives?

I really hope that I'm simply doing something wrong.

If someone has had the same problem and managed to solve it, I would very much appreciate some advice.

I would much rather spend some time configuring digiKam correctly than give up on it. I really want this software to become the central management system for my photo collection.

Thanks in advance!

Ok so I'm primarily using Digikam for hierarchical tag data, and I've got it set up to write the metadata directly to the file as per the instructions on this page: Setup of Digikam for Windows Compatibility

At some point, I ended up with a small number of files that the metadata got written to sidecars instead - not sure how, but it doesn't really matter, it's fixed now and writing new metadata correctly. However, I'm stuck with these files that have sidecars and I'm not sure how to fix things so the metadata on those sidecars gets embedded into the file and I can safely delete the sidecar, and I couldn't find specific instructions on how to do that when searching, so now I'm here.

Does anyone know how to embed metadata that's on a sidecar into the file? Ideally I'd like to be able to do it in a batch and just get everything in the folder at once, but it's not so large a number that I can't do it individually if I have to. I appreciate the help!