[Shotwell] Shotwell and background tasks

[Dov Grobgeld <dov grobgeld gmail com>]

Hi,

I've been using shotwell for the last few years to handle my ever growing photo collection, which now consists of roughly 50,000 images. Unfortunately over the years, as the collection kept growing, I have felt that I have had to increasingly struggle:

1. Every now the database is corrupted and rows with null entries are inserted. I now have several scripts in place that repairs the corrupted database. But I still have a large data range that no longer appear in the date events, and I haven't figured out yet why pictures of these dates are different.

2. While running shotwell is taking up 100% CPU (well, of one core) constantly and is sluggish and only partially responsive. This 100% CPU no longer goes away.

I finally managed to patch shotwell to fix the number two issues. The only patch that is really needed is to turn off the background scraping that goes on in LibraryMonitor:

@@ -527,7 +511,7 @@ public class LibraryMonitor : DirectoryMonitor {
         completed_monitorable_verifies++;
         auto_update_progress(completed_monitorable_verifies, total_monitorable_verifies);
        
-        Idle.add(verify_monitorable.callback, DEFAULT_PRIORITY);
+        // Idle.add(verify_monitorable.callback, DEFAULT_PRIORITY);
         yield;

I'm bothered with this being the default behavior, which is the reason for this post. At the very least there should be a flag whether to do the backgrund monitoring. Or the ability to turn it off for e.g. 5 minutes whenever there is user interaction. Does anyone really like the current behavior?

Thanks!

Dov