Re: Synchronizing

["John Stowers" <john stowers lists gmail com>]

Hi,

You may  all have noticed from my persistent blog posts [0] on planet
GNOME that recent Conduit [1] releases (and SVN) support two way sync
of FSpot instances over the local network. I encourage you to check it
our and report feedback in #conduit

Basically, for a quick run down on how to do that see here [2]

Conduit talks to FSpot over its dbus interface. It gets files (and
associated metadata) and pushes it to another FSpot instance on the
local network. Currently, if you want to sync two Fspot instances
without metadata loss, this is what must be done. If you sync via an
intermediary such as a folder you will lose all metadata [3]. I have a
few ideas for solutions to get around this [4].

On Jan 18, 2008 9:58 AM, Ian Young <ian greenleaf gmail com> wrote:

Girish,

I think the problem is that Unison just syncs files - it's totally
unaware of particular programs that may own the files.  So short of
writing something complex to pull the hidden tag out of the image
metadata, you won't be able to sync things according to organization
done through F-Spot.  This is an area where Conduit may prove useful
once it's more mature - can't say I'm real sure about that though.

I'm sure that Conduit will be able to achieve a full two way sync of Fspot instances via an intermediary in the short term future, im just not sure that the way I envision doing this is a good (sustainable and non hack) Idea. I am still holding out hope for gio/gvfs supporting xmp (and sidecar) natively, as a cleaner solution to this problem.

I am swamped with work on conduit ATM, if someone out there really wants to see super excellent FSpot sync then I encourage them to test this, report their success, and even hack up some fixes to the problems. Seriously, network sync of FSpot is a hard one for me to test when I only have one computer.

Regards,

John Stowers

[0] http://www.johnstowers.co.nz/blog/index.php/category/planet-gnome/
[1] http://www.conduit-project.org
[2] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/conduit-list/2008-January/msg00025.html
[3] Unless you have 'write metadata to file' checked, and Fspot correctly scans the metadata when the file is imported into the other instance. Or you only import files with one tag to one folder, and then get conduit to re tag them when synced.
[4] Basically conduit supports conversions of everything. When converting photo -> file we could write out sidecar files, that way the conversion from file -> photo will read them in and reconstruct the photo metadata