[Shotwell] Problem and question importing from f-spot

[Lucas Beeler]

Hi Shuihuzhuan,

> I have a weird problem importing my database
> from f-spot and I don't know how to workaround this.

F-spot writes tags to files in a fairly unconventional way (especially
if you've arranged your tags in a hierarchical tree inside of F-Spot).
We worked hard in Shotwell 0.11 to get F-Spot import to work in 90% of
cases, even if the metadata was duplicated (sometimes incorrectly) in
the photo files themselves. Unfortunately, I think you're one of the
10% of people whose F-Spot database and files, given that you've
worked with them over multiple versions of F-Spot and the F-Spot
metadata writing plugin, still can't be completely handled by
Shotwell's "Import from F-Spot..." feature. The fact that you've got
XMP sidecar files with error messages in them is an important clue
here.

That said, I think there's a workaround that might solve your problem.
One option that you have (and that I'd recommend trying) is this. You
can use the exiv2 command line utility (see http://www.exiv2.org/ for
documentation, but the exiv2 program should be available through your
Linux distributions' repositories) to strip tag information out of
your photo files *before* trying to do an F-Spot import into Shotwell.
This way, there won't be any conflicts between what's in your F-Spot
database and what's been written (possibly incorrectly) into your
photo files that Shotwell can't resolve.

> I can't do a lot of testings because shotwell
> systematically crashes during f-spot import

Even with conflicting information stored in photo files versus
F-Spot's database, Shotwell shouldn't crash. So we consider this a
bug. To help us debug this problem, if you could try to get a stack
trace and log file from a run in which Shotwell crashed, then email
these files to shotwell at yorba.org, that would be helpful. To learn how
to generate a stack trace and log file, see the "I found a bug in
Shotwell. How can I report it?" section of the Shotwell FAQ here:
http://redmine.yorba.org/projects/shotwell/wiki/ShotwellFAQ

Cheers,
Lucas