On Fri, 2010-09-03 at 10:05 -0700, Adam Dingle wrote: > Take, > > thanks for your thoughts, and I'm glad that you like Shotwell overall! > It's true that Shotwell today is designed for the single-user case and > does not work well when your library is on an NFS share or when several > users run it on the same machine. Lots of users want to be able to > share photos easily on a local network (or across the Internet), and we > want to extend Shotwell to be able to handle that use case: see > http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/1292 . That might involve using a 'real' > database (e.g. MySQL) as you suggest and/or some sort of peer-to-peer > communication between Shotwell instances; we haven't yet decided exactly > how this will work. In any case, this feature won't be in the next > release (0.8) but I hope we'll get to it in the next few releases since > lots and lots of people want this. :)
I think the first thing to do would be to de-couple the Shotwell storage layer into an external library. I know there is a ticket about that somewhere but I can't find it. That would mean creating an official API for it, after which it is a lot easier to implement sharing and server options. Also note that the DB only contains the meta-data so sync'ing the DB would not actually sync the files; in addition, you may not want to sync all the files: for instance, I don't have enough disk space on my laptop to store a copy of all the photographs I have on my server so I'd like to use the server as an archive and the laptop as a working repository where I only have the latest photos. I put together a simple diagram that shows how a de-coupled store could work to provide the ability to share photos between users on the same or different computers and potentially using different databases to store the meta-data (OO.o Draw format): http://ubuntuone.com/p/EtI/ This would also enable things like: * other applications (like Lombard) to have access to the media store * the media store to be installed on a server with no GUI and act as a media server * the inclusion of non-Shotwell stores (such as a UPnP server or a Flickr pool) Of course this opens up a whole new level of complexity, such as how do you search for a given tag across multiple stores? And should you be able to assign your own tags to photos that are stored into a store you're not the owner of? Cheers, Bruno _______________________________________________ Shotwell mailing list [email protected] http://lists.yorba.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/shotwell
