Some out-of-camera JPEGs have bad metadata that digiKam doesn’t parse correctly. The problematic photos have the same characteristics:
- In the Properties tab, there is no Photograph Properties section, instead digiKam has a digiKam Properties section with the caption set to None.
- 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