Re: importing directories

[Larry Ewing <lewing novell com>]

On Thu, 2005-12-01 at 09:02 +1100, Bengt Thuree wrote:
> > Say you start up f-spot for the first time and have a bunch of pictures
> > that you want to leave in place because you are just testing it.  A
> > couple of days later you plug a card reader in, gvm starts the import
> > process you import all your photos from the card.  You look at them for
> > a while then unplug the card reader and close f-spot.  The next day you
> > put the card back in the camera see it still has the pictures delete
> > them and take a few more.  You go back to f-spot import the new photos
> > then decide you want to look at the photos from yesterday and double
> > click one.  You get an giant ? and then freak out when you realize you
> > lost all your photos from the previous day.
> > 
> > Originally f-spot always copied if the card was on removable media and
> > always left it in place otherwise.  More than one person lost photos
> > because they thought that importing did in fact copy and removed the
> > originals.  Always copying from removable media also prevents a person
> > from using a laptop with an external usb drive to hold photos, which is
> > not uncommon.
> > 
> > I added the option the way it is now to avoid those problems.  I don't
> > consider them solved, that will take more work, but it is now harder to
> > lose your images and that is worth the pain of some people needing to
> > click a box to me.
> 
> I agree with you Larry, Priority is to not loose any pictures, but I
> also agree with David's suggestion.
> 
> This since the way I use it now, have the pictures in a directory on my
> hard disk, and every time I start an import session, F-Spot starts
> directly to import the same pictures from previous directory again. Need
> to cancel, and then change directory and other settings. But then f-spot
> has already imported a few photos. (only done with few photos while
> testing various patches, don't use f-spot for real yet.... hopefully
> soon. Eagerly waiting for good handling of XMP tags, rename, and modify
> time) 
> 

The thing is, it doesn't do this, at least not the way you describe.
The import dialog will not automatically open to a directory unless
you've already imported from that directory durring that session (and
I'll change even that behavior soon) or called import from the command
line.  Additionally simply clicking the option will clean up any
incorrectly copied photos, and add the photos to the catalog in place.
This isn't exactly a nightmare senario.  I agree it isn't ideal but
let's aim for ideal instead of just saving the value of an option that
will bite some people later. Saving the setting is easy and wrong.  I'd
be less opposed to an option in the preferences dialog that amounted to
something like "Leave local images in place by default" but I still
think it is poor solution.

> The way I currently work is to copy all photos manually from the card to
> a directory on my desktop, and then would love to use f-spot to rename
> (How about the status on this patch?
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=302566) each photo to a better
> name and move them to the appropriate directory. The last part do not
> work yet, so these temporary directory grows and grows (all of 2005 and
> half 2004 in them so far, waiting for f-spot...)
> 
> I would love the feature to just scan for new photos in one or more
> watched directories, as well as a copy From/To solution.
> 

I understand that this is desirable.

> Having a build option is not possible at all. In that case a special
> configuration file for read only parameters is better. A lot of people
> do not build f-spot themselves.
> 

Agreed, something isn't a user setting if it is set at build time.

> Is it not possible to warn if "importing bit without copyin" from a
> removable media?
> 

As I mentioned above, that isn't the only case where people have lost
photos.  Some people (you know who you are) expect a copy during the
import and act accordingly, even when importing from the local
filesystem.

--Larry