[Shotwell] Feature request: merging databases

[Adam Dingle]

When you enable the option to write metadata into pictures as Vincent 
suggested, Shotwell will store tag (i.e. keywords) and rotation 
information there.  But that's not a complete solution to this problem, 
since Shotwell stores other metadata (such as photo edits and event 
membership) only in its SQL database, not in pictures themselves.

Unfortunately it's not possible to merge two Shotwell databases today.  
This is a significant limitation.  We hope to address this in one of two 
ways:

1. Provide a command that merges two databases explicitly.  This is 
http://redmine.yorba.org/issues/3393 .

2. Enhance Shotwell to store all metadata (including photo edits and 
events) in sidecar files.  If we implement this, you'll be able to merge 
two databases by simply combining two directories and then reimporting.  
This is http://redmine.yorba.org/issues/1879 .

I think that approach (2) is the right long-term direction for Shotwell.

adam

On 10/14/2011 06:44 AM, Vincent wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Maybe you should consider to write the metadata into the pictures?
>
> See: http://yorba.org/shotwell/help/other-files.html#writing-metadata
>
> I think it should be enable by default...
>
> 2011/10/14 Giampiero Salvi<giampisalvi at gmail.com>
>
>> Hi,
>> Background: I use Shotwell the following way. I have a desktop
>> computer where I keep all my pictures and then I have a small laptop
>> that I bring with me when I am travelling that I use to download the
>> pictures from my camera and sometimes organize and publish them during
>> my longer trips. Both computers are running the latest version of
>> Ubuntu, and the version of Shotwell that comes with it.
>>
>> Problem: I do not want to keep the whole database of pictures on the
>> small laptop because of space constraints on the disk. So, after every
>> trip, I would like to copy the photos to the desktop and delete them
>> from the laptop. I can do this easily by copying the picture files
>> with tools such as rsync and then importing again. The problem is that
>> any information contained in ~/.shotwell/data/photo.db on the laptop
>> is not transferred to the corresponding database on the desktop. For
>> example, any tags I may have added using the laptop are lost.
>>
>> Question1: is there a good way to merge the SQLite databases without
>> breaking Shotwell functionality?
>>
>> Question2 (feature request): could it be possible to add a function in
>> Shotwell that merges the databases and copies the picture files
>> between different computers?
>>
>> Thank you for the great job you have done so far!!
>> Giampiero
>>
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