[Shotwell] Importing to ~/Pictures, previously imported 'in place'

[Adam Dingle]

On Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 4:48 AM, Kent Tenney <ktenney at gmail.com> wrote:
Again, I've come around to Shotwell's world view. 

When I started with SW I left my photos where they had always been, 
since, I've been moving them to ~/Pictures/ 
I now prefer the directory structure Shotwell provides. 

Can the ~60k in the old tree be moved without losing their tags? 

Yes, with a few caveats.

If you move the photos manually from the old tree to anywhere in ~/Pictures, Shotwell will notice the photos in their new location and will forget the old location of these photos.  All metadata will be preserved.  If you do this, however, you'll need to manually move each photo into an appropriate directory.  It would be nice if there were a Shotwell command that would rearrange existing photos in your library directory according to your chosen directory schema, but we don't have that yet.  See http://redmine.yorba.org/issues/2170 .

So today, if you want Shotwell to arrange these photos for you you'll need to remove them from your Shotwell library and reimport them.  But then all metadata will be lost, unless you enable writing metadata to the photo files.  If you do enable that, then tags will be preserved.  But Shotwell can't write event information to photo files, so if you've organized your photos into events then after you remove them and reimport each photo will once again be in a default event corresponding to the day it was taken.

If you want to take this approach, you can do the following:

1. Enable metadata writing and wait until Shotwell has written metadata to all photos in the library.
2. Exit Shotwell.
3. Rename the directory containing the photos.
4. Start Shotwell.  All photos in the directory will be marked as missing.
5. Select Missing Files in the sidebar, then select all photos in that view.  Choose Remove From Library.
6. Rename the directory back to its original name.
7. Drag the directory into the Shotwell window to import photos from it.  When prompted, choose Copy Photos.  Shotwell will reimport the photos and will copy them into the directory structure under ~/Pictures.

Hope this helps!
adam