Installing mysql for digikam

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Dec 11, 2013, at 17:58, David Lyon wrote:

> OK-- one small step which is probably the critical one has been missing. I have attached the log from XQuartx and a screen shot of the set up within digikam once it's opened which requires the mysql server set up.
> I have never made it to this point and saw the necessity of setting the preferences for mysql server. If someone can help me understand the answers to: Host Name:
> 		           Port:
> my user ID for mysql is known as is my pssword
> Anything required in the "Datbase Connections Options"?
> I think that will provide a stable program.

If the MySQL server is running on the same computer on which you want to run digikam, then the hostname should be “localhost”, otherwise the hostname should be the hostname or IP address of the computer running the MySQL server. The port should be the default MySQL server port, which is 3306.

The username should be a valid MySQL username on your MySQL server; the server comes preconfigured with a single user, “root”, with its password set to the empty string. Since the root account is the administrator account which can be used to do anything on your server, including reading or deleting all data, you should secure it against unauthorized access by changing the MySQL server’s root password to something else (the MAMP page includes instructions for doing so). Having done this, you could fill “root” and the MySQL root account’s password into digikam. Alternately, if you’re going to use your MySQL server for other things as well, you may want to make a separate MySQL account for digikam and use that.

I don’t know what kind of “database connection options” they’re referring to. I’d try leaving them blank, or finding the digikam documentation to see what kinds of options you can use and if any of them would be useful to you.

Your screen shot showed you filled in the value “/Users/David/Desktop/PICS TO PRACTICS” into the two fields “Schema Name” and “Thumbnails Schema Name”. This is probably not correct. A schema name in MySQL is a database name; it’s asking you what names you want it to use when creating the databases in your MySQL server. Alternately, you might need to create them yourself, and then tell it here what names you used; I’m not sure; you’d have to consult the digikam documentation. I would make up two database names and fill them in and see what happens. Either it’ll create them and use them, or it’ll complain that they don’t exist, in which case you’ll need to create them.


You should probably read a digikam-specific tutorial about this. I found this one about setting it up to use MySQL:

http://userbase.kde.org/Digikam/Using_digiKam_with_MySQL

It also says it’s not necessary, and that usually it uses SQLite instead, which requires no setup. It says:

“Of course, you might wonder why you’d want to switch to MySQL when SQLite already does a good job of managing the data? Using MySQL as digiKam’s database back-end allows you to store the data on a remote server. This way, you can use multiple digiKam installations (e.g., on your notebook and desktop machine) to access and manage your photo collections.”

So if that’s something you want to do, then using MySQL is a good idea.