Rewriting EXIF tags in JPEGs

Some out-of-camera JPEGs have bad metadata that digiKam doesn’t parse correctly. The problematic photos have the same characteristics:

  1. In the Properties tab, there is no Photograph Properties section, instead digiKam has a digiKam Properties section with the caption set to None.
  2. In the Metadata tab, not metadata is shown under Exif. However, full details are available under Exiftool.

The solution is to rewrite the EXIF tags using exiftool. This fixes the bad metadata and allows digiKam to properly read the photo’s metadata.

exiftool -overwrite_original -all= -tagsfromfile @ -all:all *.JPG

For the files with bad EXIF metadata, the command will report the following warning:

Warning: [minor] Error reading PreviewImage from file - DSC06635.JPG

Fix missing icons in digiKam

It looks like digiKam installed on a default Gnome environment has missing icons. For example the "pick" icons (the little flags for Rejected/Pending/Accepted) are missing. The reason is that the default Gnome icon pack, Adwaita is missing some of the icons used by digiKam.

The solution is to install the Breeze icon theme and then select it in digiKam:

$ sudo apt install breeze-icon-theme

and then in digikam Settings -> Configure digiKam -> Miscellaneous -> Appearance -> Icon theme and select "Breeze". Actually you can leave it as "Use Icon Theme From System" and it will use Adwaita and only fall back to Breeze for missing icons. However, I do find it more pleasant to have a consistent icon theme.