Recursively remove digikam’s xmp embeded tags

Because digikam made a mess of the tags I started to add to my pictures I decided to start from scratch. Note that I tried to get the max and I had set to write tags both to .xmp sidecar files and inside the image files. I also use the mysql backend.

One of the above broken everything (I started seeing _digikam_root_tag) and some of my tags were doubled. So all in all I wanted to delete them all:

• Remove your collection from digikam
• Drop all tables from the digikam database
• Remove all .xmp files. In the folder containing your collection: find . -name *.xmp -exec rm {} ;
• Remove all embedded xmp tags (again in the folder containing you collection) exiftool -r -P -xmp:TagsList= -xmp:LastKeywordXMP= -xmp:HierarchicalSubject= -xmp:Subject= -iptc:Keywords= *

DON’T FOLLOW THIS BLINDLY

This is just a sketch of the process. If you don’t understand what are you doing don’t do it! I also kept all .original files exiftool generated, just in case I discover something later on.