[Shotwell] Slow Import with many duplicates...

[Kenneth Jernigan]

Hello,

When trying to import from an SD card of 1600 photos on Ubuntu 12.10 (Shotwell version 0.14.1), shotwell slowed to a crawl.  After several attempts, each one ramping 1 of my CPUs to 100%, I never made it past 12% complete.  I killed the Unity Photo Lens (which was consuming 30% of the second CPU), but saw no change in the import.  After giving this several tries, I gave up for an afternoon.

Back at it this evening and having seen a comment on an old bug #3867 about importing photos from folder rather than SD card, I decided to give this a try.  In this case, it only took about 4 minutes to import approx 88 photos with 1300 considered duplicates.  However, another "293 photos/videos failed to import because the photo library folder was not writable".  I have 1.3 GB left on the partition where I store pictures, so being unsure why this is called not writable, I studied the import error log and saw the following good and bad examples:


/media/lUSERNAME/CANON_DC/DCIM/103___02/IMG_1539.JPG duplicates existing media item
    /media/Media/Pictures/2013/02/10/IMG_1539.JPG

Photos/Videos Not Imported Because Shotwell Couldn't Copy Them into its Library:

couldn't copy /media/USERNAME/CANON_DC/DCIM/104___03/IMG_1793.JPG
    to /media/USERNAME/CANON_DC/DCIM/104___03/IMG_1793.JPG
    error message: Error opening file '/media/Media/Pictures/2013/03/02/IMG_1793.JPG': Permission denied


It was at this time that I realized that my folder permissions on that partition had most likely been damaged recently.  Looking at my partition's user permissions (set to ensure multiple users can see the photos), I realized the setgid flag was cleared.  Having fixed the setgid flag, I was able to import the remaining 293 files in 5 minutes.  I'm perplexed, however, over the behavior observed when initially doing the SD card import.  Is this a possible bug?  Need me to clear the setgid flag and try again providing some debug output?  Or is shotwell primarily designed for single user systems, such that multiple partitions and shared pictures directories not considered nominal use case?

Thanks,
Ken