[Shotwell] Reimporting with tags

[Adam Dingle]

On 12/06/2010 01:36 PM, Paulo J. Matos wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I did a mistake and I am looking for a workaround to what I did...
> So, shotwell 0.7.2. I have a list of folders like:
> 2005
>    |- event1
>    |- event2
> 2006
>    |- event3
>
> and so on... in total I upload them at the same time, about 15000
> photos.
>
> However, this was stupid. I should have uploaded them one event at a
> time, tagged and edited time/dated the photos of that import with the
> event name and date (as exif info is not present in most of them).
>
> Now, if I try to import the photos, they will be duplicated and I cannot
> get the photos into one selection.
>
> Any tips?

Paulo,

Unfortunately I don't see any easy workaround.  You might need to start 
with an empty library and import again, importing one event at a time as 
you described.  I assume that you would prefer not to do that because 
you've already applied some tags or photo adjustments in Shotwell and 
you don't want to lose those, but today you may not have much choice.

At first I thought the following workaround might work, but I don't 
think it will help:

1. In Shotwell, select all photos and press Delete to move them to the 
trash.
2. Drag just the first event's folder (e.g. 2005/event1) into Shotwell.  
Shotwell will resurrect that event's photos from the trash back into the 
library.
3. The Last Import view will now show the resurrected photos, and you 
can tag them and edit their date/time as you please.
4. Drag the next event's folder (e.g. 2005/event2) into Shotwell.
5. Unfortunately, at this point the Last Import view will show both the 
photos resurrected in steps 2 and 4.  This is possibly a bug.  If it 
showed you just the photos resurrected in step 4, then you'd be able to 
tag and edit these photos, and repeat the process for all your events.

As I've mentioned on this mailing list before, we hope to evolve 
Shotwell to give you better visibilty into where files live on disk.  In 
particular, once we implement a folder tree in the sidebar 
(http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/1594) you'll easily be able to select all 
photos belonging to a particular folder, which would easily solve your 
problem.

adam