Re: Refresh thumbnails: Request for Help

["Girish Kulkarni" <girish hri res in>]

Hi Christoph,

Thanks for your reply.

On Nov 18, 2007 9:04 PM, Christoph Moench-Tegeder <cmt burggraben net> wrote:
> This could be "expected behaviour" depending on how you imported your
> pictures into f-spot beforehand. If you unchecked the "Copy files to
> the Photos folder", f-spot does not create a copy of these pictures.

I don't remember now what settings I had when I imported those
pictures into f-spot so yes this could be "expected behaviour". But I
keep all my pictures in the Photos folder now so that I don't have
unnecessary copies lying around everywhere.

> If you kept "Copy files to the Photos folder" checked, it sound like
> you really have encountered a bug (except if you hand-manipulated your
> "Photos" folder).

As I said, I am really not sure of this yet. Will have to try that
again once I get f-spot working.

> The "Refresh Thumbnail" function is there in case you have modified (or
> perhaps even replaced) an image on-disk. It just creates a new thumbnail
> from the image at the location stored in the database.

Hmm ... But it didn't look like f-spot was creating a *new* thumbnail.
It couldn't have, because the images were no longer there. What it was
doing instead was just doing a fresh rendering the thumbnail image.

> > I thought that might work so I went and promptly deleted my
> > .thumbnails directory. F-Spot does not work any more. It opens and
> > remains stuck without showing me any thumbnails.
>
> This should not happen. At least the current version of f-spot re-creates
> the .thumbnails folder if needed.

I find that f-spot *is* creating a new .thumbnails directory, but when
I try to (re-)import my pictures into it, it crashes. I then have to
kill the process. This has been happening consistently. I also tried
deleting the photos.db.

So here, as a summary, is what happened:

 - F-Spot was running fine, with 3,000+ photos imported in
   it. Most of these were in the Photos directory.
 - Some thumbnails pointed to photos which were outside the
   Photos directory. These pointed nowhere now, because I moved
   all those photos *manually* to the Photos directory.
 - I wanted to "refresh" these thumbnails so that they point at
   the new pictures.
 - I deleted the .thumbnails in order to do that.
 - F-Spot showed empty boxes now, with all other
   information (tags, dates, ...) intact.
 - So I deleted the photos.db, with a plan to start afresh.
 - F-Spot no longer works. I can launch it alright, but it
   crashes when I try to import any image.

Could this be a bug? More practically, is there anything else I can do
to restore the F-Spot settings completely to what they were before I
started using it?

Thanks,
Girish.