On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 10:38:54PM -0600, 3×5 wrote:
OK. So I tried to use my db.bk file but this gave me the 'malformed' error immediately and closed Shotwell. So I went to my manual back up. This will start up fine, until I leave it alone for a few minutes. Then, It will just keep saying it's auto-importing photos, and it will do it over and over again. It will get to 100%, then say it's preparing to auto-import photos, then import to 100% again, and again. I have no idea what it could be importing, as no camera is plugged in. Every time it does this, the 'import' is slower and it slows down the rest of Shotwell more.
I also run shotwell with the datadir flag and I've encountered this same problem if I pass in the incorrect datadir flag. It sounds like you are setting your data directory to the base directory of your external hard drive. Shotwell starts up, sees the thumbnails, thinks they are new photos, imports them, generates new thumbnails, and the cycle starts over again. Most people would think this is overkill but I use git to version my entire Shotwell library of over 14K photos. It makes it easy to keep my Shotwell library on multiple computers and it is easy to recover from situations like this. The main thing that I like about it is that I can ensure that all of my photos/videos are consistent. I recently had a hard drive go bad in one of my computers and it was subtly corrupting files before it finally died. It corrupted several hundred of my photos and I was able to recover everything using git. I know that git wasn't designed for storing lots of large binary files but it works fairly well. It'll double your disk space requirements but I think the benefits are far greater. I periodically run 'git gc' to reduce the amount of disk space required since I have Shotwell write the metadata back to the photos. Brian
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