What would be the alternative to easily search through meta data of thousands of photos? Is there a non-proprietary database (engine or schema?), or other format that is scalable enough? I doubt that storing everything as a sidecar would be fast enough.
Just for info, just did a quick test: the digikam 'proprietary' database is a normal sqlite database that you can easily open and query in standard tools like duckdb. So pretty accessible, much better than some proprietary binary file, or using exif tools on 1000s of photos.
