Re: [Shotwell] copying shotwell thumbnails

[Jim Nelson <jim yorba org>]

On Wed, Apr 16, 2014 at 5:08 AM, Holger Schmeisky <holger s fu-berlin de> wrote:

first of all thank you for developing this awesome program! It is one of the reasons I could convince my wife to use Linux :-)

That's very cool to hear.

Now a question: When I move my photo library from one computer to another, I manage to copy the database just fine. However it is very annoying to not have the thumbnails anymore, because browsing the photo database is much more difficult with all the loading. I tried copying the .cache/shotwell folder from the computer where the thumbnails exist, but still, when I browse the library on the new computer all thumbnails are missing and have to be regenerated.

I'm not exactly sure what the problem is here.  The real trick to moving Shotwell libraries from one machine to another is to ensure that every file is placed in the same file path -- that includes your home directory's name.  So, if I went from one machine where my user name is "jim" to a machine where my user name is "jnelson", there's going to be problems.  External hard drives are also a problem.  I noticed that an earlier version of Ubuntu the mount point changed from "/media/<drive id>" to "/media/<user name>/<drive id>".  That's a similar issue.

-- Jim