Re: [Shotwell] How to delete a photo from the shotwell databse

[Larry Bradley <shotwell stz9z ncf ca>]

My program doesn't do a lot more than recent versions of Shotwell do. It is just a bit more convenient  for adding tags and titles.

The user sees the photo, and there is a window where he can add tags (it is actually a drop-down list with predefined tags for my purposes) and a window where he can enter a description.

The tags get added to the Shotwell tag table, and the description is used as the title.

However, there is also a SQLITE3 virtual table, containing the photoid, the description, and the tags. The SQLITE full-text search facility allows you to do sophisticated searches , for example find all the photos  with the words "Larry " OR "Diane" AND NOT "Fred". It also allows proximity searches.

Since the description field gets stored in the phototable as the title, Shotwell can also perform full-text search (which works very well - I like the incremental search) but it is limited to an AND operation - find the photos whose title contains ALL the words.

I think it would be easy (!) in Shotwell to make the windows for editing tags and titles larger, which would be much more convenient.

The use of a virtual table that contains the title and the tags would allow a more sophisticated search facility:

Look for grandchildren (a tag) and "Harry OR Sally" to find all the photos with the tag "grandchildrer" with either Harry or Sally in the title.

On Mon, 2018-04-09 at 09:18 +0200, Jens Georg wrote:

> > Do you plan to remove the list of tags, and have one entry per tag?
>
>
> Yes, something like that. Make proper normalized tables etc.
>
> > The problem for my app was given a photo id, find all the tag table
> > entries with this "thumb id" and then remove the thumb and write the
> > data back, rather than just finding all the records with the thumb and
> > deleting them.
> >
> > I realize that not many people are going to want to process the data
> > outside of Shotwell, but having a good description of the various
> > tables and their relationships would be useful.
>
>
> There is a little bit of information available here:
>
> https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Shotwell/Architecture/Database
>
> > Many years ago I wrote a program to catalog photos (this was before I
> > heard about Shotwell. It used a database system with full-text search
> > abilities.
> > When I switched to Shotwell, I rewrote the program in Python, and
> > added a virtual table to the Shotwell database to make Boolean
> > searching easy. This I can use all the of the SQLITE3 full-text search
> > capabilities to find photos.
>
>
> Would you care to explain a bit deeper what you are doing there?