This should never happen with Shotwell and we regard it as a serious bug. I have reproduced a related bug where files on an external drive get marked offline and never come back, but that's different from your problem: http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/2857 In general, you should never lose events and tags (and other metadata) simply because the photo has been marked offline.
I'd like to know more specifics about how your father's system is configured. It sounds like there's a soft link in his ~/Pictures directory that points to the external hard drive. Do you recall how you imported the photos into Shotwell? Shotwell does not explicitly support soft links, which means if you imported ~/Pictures or the soft link, Shotwell will not traverse it. I'm guessing you imported from the drive, i.e. dragging in a folder like this: /home/dad/Pictures/soft-link/MyPhotos And not directly from the external drive path, i.e.: /media/ExternalDrive/MyPhotos Shotwell won't detect that soft-link is a soft link and will import everything from MyPhotos on down. An easy way to verify this is to click on one of the files and then View -> Extended Infomation. The filename is the path Shotwell uses. But at this point if I unplug the drive and re-plug it back in, I run into the problem I mentioned earlier (http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/2857). Examining the database shows me that the tags and events are preserved. In other words, if we fix this bug, I think everything will work. So I must be missing something here. I would like to reproduce this problem so we can fix it. Is there anything else about the setup that you've not mentioned, or other steps that occurred before this happened? Also, what version of Shotwell is this? -- Jim On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 1:30 PM, Matthias Adrian Mendler < [email protected]> wrote: > Hey, > > my father has a lot of pictures, an old notebook, so I was really happy > about shotwell. Nice & simple. He finally seems to get the difference to > "normal" folders and getting used to the idea of events and tags. > Especially since I am tagging and ordering his 30k pictures for him :) > > The problem right now is, that his pictures are on an external hard > disk. He once started shotwell without it being connected to the > notebook. Obviously they appeared in missing folders. After it was > plugged back and shotwell restarted, all pictures are back, not in > missing files anymore - but all the events and tags are gone. The only > thing shotwell remembers is which pictures I imported last :/ > > Is there any way to restore that? I didn't find really anything about > this subject. The closest thing was someone moving/renaming his folder > and the solution was just moving it back. Won't this work with external > hard disks? > > I should mention, that the external hard disks picture folder is linked > to the picture folder in the home. > > Thanks a lot, I see your program is still heavily in development, and it > looks very promising. 加油 > > Matthias > > _______________________________________________ > Shotwell mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.yorba.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/shotwell > _______________________________________________ Shotwell mailing list [email protected] http://lists.yorba.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/shotwell
