<chapter id="tool-maintenance">
<chapterinfo>

    <abstract>
        <para>
            Maintenance is a tool running processes in the background to maintain image collections and database contents.
        </para>
    </abstract>

    <keywordset>
        <keyword>Maintenance</keyword>
        </keywordset>
    </chapterinfo>

    <title>Maintenance Tool</title>

    <sect1 id="tool-maintenance-intro">
        <title>Introduction</title>

        <para>
            Depending on your workflow, your &digikam; settings and whether you work on your images collection also with other programs it might be necessary to run maintenance operations from time to time to update the &digikam; databases and also your images regarding duplicates, face tags, quality labels, &etc; The maintenance tool can do that for you, even more than one operation in one go depending on your requirements.
        </para>

    </sect1>

    <sect1 id="tool-maintenance-features">
        <title>The Maintenance Features</title>

        <sect2 id="tool-maintenance-features-common">
            <title>The Common Options</title>

            <para>
                In the Common Options section you can restrict the scope of the maintenance process(es) to certain albums or tags. You got to un-check <guilabel>Whole albums collection</guilabel> or <guilabel>Whole tags collection</guilabel> to get access to the drop down fields where you can select albums or tags. Note that in this drop down field you have a context menu to select or deselect children and/or parents and also to invert the selection. If you switch from <guilabel>Albums</guilabel> to <guilabel>Tags</guilabel> or vice versa your selection in the now grayed out item will remain untouched which might be useful if you need a certain selection more often.
            </para>
            
            <para>
                Since many of the processes the maintenance tool can perform are time consuming (depending also on the scope, of course) you have the choice to check <guilabel>Work on all processor cores</guilabel> if your machine has more than one and they are not occupied otherwise.
            </para>

        </sect2>

        <sect2 id="tool-maintenance-features-scan">
            <title>The Scan for New Items Tool</title>

            <para>
                This process will scan the collections you defined in 
                <menuchoice>
                    <guimenu>Settings</guimenu><guisubmenu>Configure &digikam;...</guisubmenu><guimenuitem>Collections</guimenuitem>
                </menuchoice> 
                for new items, &ie; image files you added to your collections while &digikam; was not running. You can run this process also automatically on &digikam; startup by checking <guilabel>Scan for new items at startup</guilabel> in 
                <menuchoice>
                    <guimenu>Settings</guimenu><guisubmenu>Configure &digikam;...</guisubmenu><guimenuitem>Miscellaneous</guimenuitem>
                </menuchoice>.
            </para>

        </sect2>

        <sect2 id="tool-maintenance-features-thumbs">
            <title>The Rebuild Thumbnails Tool</title>

            <para>
                Rebuilding the thumbnails might be necessary if you worked on your images with other applications or if you changed the thumbnail size in 
                <menuchoice>
                    <guimenu>Settings</guimenu><guisubmenu>Configure &digikam;...</guisubmenu><guisubmenu>Views</guisubmenu><guimenuitem>Tree-Views</guimenuitem>
                </menuchoice>. 
                The <quote> Scan for changed or non-cataloged items</quote> option can speed up the process in the first case or if you just added pictures to your collection.
            </para>

        </sect2>

        <sect2 id="tool-maintenance-features-fingerprints">
            <title>The Rebuild Fingerprints Tool</title>

            <para>
                Fingerprints are necessary for finding duplicates and similar items and for finding images by sketches. For detailed description see 
                <link linkend="using-mainwindow-fuzzysearches">Fuzzy View</link>.
            </para>

        </sect2>

        <sect2 id="tool-maintenance-features-duplicates">
            <title>The Find Duplicates Tool</title>

            <para>
                The Find Duplicates Tool is doing the same as the <guilabel>Find duplicates</guilabel> button in the Fuzzy View, but here you can combine it with other maintenance operations and you have the chance to check <quote>Work on all processor cores</quote> under Common Options (see above) to speed up the process.
            </para>

        </sect2>

        <sect2 id="tool-maintenance-features-faces">
            <title>The Face Management Tool</title>
            <subtitle>Detect and Recognize Faces</subtitle>

            <para>
                This is the same process you can access in the People View with the <guilabel>Scan collection for faces</guilabel> button. Here you just cannot set the Fast - Accurate parameter and the option <quote>Clear and rebuild all training data</quote>. For more information about the Faces Data Management options see 
                <link linkend="using-mainwindow-peopleview">People View</link>.
            </para>

        </sect2>

        <sect2 id="tool-maintenance-features-quality">
            <title>The Image Quality Sorter Tool</title>

            <para>
                The Image Quality Sorter assigns quality labels to images according to the settings in 
                <menuchoice>
                    <guimenu>Settings</guimenu><guisubmenu>Configure &digikam;...</guisubmenu><guimenuitem>Image Quality Sorter</guimenuitem>
                </menuchoice>.
                There you also have to enable this tool if you want to use it. Since it is a time consuming process it's a good idea to check <guilabel>Work on all processor cores</guilabel> and restrict the job to certain albums or tags. The tool will set the red flag for <quote>rejected</quote>, the yellow one for <quote>pending</quote> and the green one for <quote>accepted</quote>.
            </para>

        </sect2>

        <sect2 id="tool-maintenance-features-sync">
            <title>The Metadata Synchronizer Tool</title>

            <para>
                TODO
            </para>

        </sect2>

    </sect1>

</chapter>

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