Re: Some way to write the meta data back into the photos as a batch?

[Larry Ewing <lewing novell com>]

On Tue, 2006-02-28 at 15:46 +1100, Jamie Wilkinson wrote:
> This one time, at band camp, Bengt Thuree wrote:
> >On Tue, 2006-02-28 at 11:50 +1100, Stephen Norris wrote:
> >> I turned off writing metadata into the photos because it took far too
> >> long.
> >> 
> >> Is there some way to have it happen all at once - essentially I'd like
> >> f-spot to be able to write the db metadata into all files (or a
> >> selection, I guess). That way I can work with it in fast mode, then have
> >> it do all the updates while I'm doing something else.
> >> 
> >> If not, does anyone else think this is worth doing?
> >
> >If the real time update of the XMP data takes to long time, then for
> >sure I am all in favor of a syncronise feature. But for me, I have not
> >noticed it takes too long (yet anyway).
> >
> >Anyone else have any comments?
> 
> I find that tagging a lot of photos at once (say, some hundred from an event
> all being tagged as part of that event) leaves f-spot locked up for about a
> minute.  I never realised until this thread that it was possibly due to
> updating the photo metadata themselves, I always thought it was just writing
> to the photos.db.
> 
Tagging without synced metadata should alread be very fast.

The plan is to update the metadata asynchronously very soon, I'm just
trying to work out the remaining kinks in the writing code before I hand
it off to something more difficult to debug. I am actually a bit ashamed
that the blocking still happens. I work very hard to make f-spot
extremely responsive and this is one of those warts I haven't gotten to
yet. 

To answer the original question:  To work around the speed issue you for
the immediate future you could turn off metadata writing and do your
actual tagging.  Once you've finished tag every changed image with a
dummy tag then turn metadata writing back on and remove the dummy tag.
All the images should be updated with the current settings at that point
(but it will take a very long time).

I'll move the async stull up on my todo list.

--Larry