The Image Area in the center is surrounded by the menu bar and the Main Toolbar at the top, the Status Bar at the bottom and the Left and Right Sidebar.
By clicking on the preview you can make it disappear and by clicking on the picture area of a thumbnail open it again.
In the top left corner of the Preview we have a few buttons for moving back and forth through the content of the album, for rotating the image, for showing or adding face tags and to switch to full screen mode. One is the Icon Area, showing thumbnails of the content of the selected album or of a search result, and the other one the Preview, showing the selected image. The OS is on it's own SSD.Table of Contents The Main digiKam Window Introduction to the Main Window Image Area Albums View Tags View Labels View Dates View Timeline View Search View Fuzzy View Map View People View The digiKam Right Sidebar Introduction to the Right Sidebar Properties Metadata Colors Maps Captions Versions view Filters Tools view The digiKam Light Table The digiKam Batch Queue Manager The Batch Queue Manager Window Batch RAW Workflow The digiKam Tag Manager The Tag Manager Toolbar The Tag Manager Window Digital Asset Management (DAM) with digiKam Introduction to DAM Build a System to Organize and Find Your Photographs Protect Your Authorship and Copyright Protect Your Images from Data Corruption and Loss A Typical DAM Workflow Face tagging with digiKam Using a Digital Camera With digiKam Introduction to the Import Interface Basic Import Interface Operations Advanced Import Interface Operations digiKam Configuration Introduction Database Settings Collections Settings Views Settings Tooltip Settings Metadata Settings Templates Settings Image Editor Settings Color Management Settings Light Table Settings Slide-Show Settings Image Quality Settings Camera Settings Miscellaneous Settings The Theme Setup Configure ShortcutsÄigiKam's main window has two areas in the center showing your photographs.
This is backed up to an online backup disk daily, and offline USB-disks weekly (the offlines are a set which are rotated out of the house). So all my data to one easy to backup volume. The folder /usr/local is actually a bind mount of /home/local. I aim to keep all my stuff in /home or /usr/local. The backup script uses notify-send to inform the desktop that the backup is in progress or is being skipped due to to digikam being active - that way I only create consistent backups, and I won't accidentally start digikam until the backup finishes.
This helps if anything goes badly wrong with the database/config files (which has only ever happened once due to a mistake I made when playing with digikam settings). On each login (approximately once per day) I have a backup script that checks if digikam is running, if not it backs up the database folder and other config files to a tar. Eventually I bought a 2 TB SSD which could easily fit my photos, the database, and all my other accumulated non-photography stuff. I switched to mariadb on SSD when the photos on the disk grew beyond 500 GB and the scans for new items started to take a large amount of time. I have digikam using mariadb with the database stored in a folder in my home directory which is on SSD.