Re: Refresh thumbnails: Request for Help

[Christoph Moench-Tegeder <cmt burggraben net>]

Hi,

> > 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".

Oh well, so it's perhaps not possible to debug this now.

> 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.

So, up to here everything was wotking fine?

>  - 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.

That's dangerous. For the next time, I'd suggest to remove the pictures
from the database ("Remove from Catalog") an re-import with "Copy
files" checked. That should not wreck your data that bad.

>  - I wanted to "refresh" these thumbnails so that they point at
>    the new pictures.

That's not possible (at least, not the way you did it). F-spot
references all files by their full paths (there is no easy other,
as perhaps by filename only; some cameras wrap their filenames after
1000 images, some people use multiple cameras using the same naming
scheme, and so on). When using "Copy files", there are safeguards
against overwriting your images by accident (at least, I hope so;
I don't use that feature myself). So, the moment you moved your
files, they were just vanished from f-spot's point of view.

>  - I deleted the .thumbnails in order to do that.

That would only help if you changed the content of your images
(perhaps, by editing with an external program or rewriting
Exif headers) and the thumbnails did not reflect the content
of the images any longer.

>  - F-Spot showed empty boxes now, with all other
>    information (tags, dates, ...) intact.

I just confirmed that myself. After removing ~/.thumbnails, f-spot
only created new thumbnails for the first page of photos. I could
re-create all other thumbnails by selecting all photos an running
the "Refresh thumbnails" command. This did take some time, but it
did work without any hassles. (Note: before doing such experiments,
make sure to have a proper backup).

>  - So I deleted the photos.db, with a plan to start afresh.

Ew, I hope you used "write metadata to files".

>  - F-Spot no longer works. I can launch it alright, but it
>    crashes when I try to import any image.

Well, then let's see how this could be repaired.
My first guess would be to restore everything from backup to the
point before you began moving your files around, then move the
files "the right way" (see above). If that is not an option,
move ~/.gnome2/f-spot and ~/Photos out of the way (I'm assuming
you have default paths) for a clean start. Then reimport
everything with "Copy files" checked to create you Photos folder
from scratch. F-spot should recognize all tags written to the files
(as long as they are JPEG, at least). If this crashes too, you
have encountered a bug which should be reportet to bugzilla;
the developers will help you out then.

Regards,
Christoph

-- 
Spare Space