On 03/19/2011 05:31 PM, Ka-Hing Cheung wrote:
I have previously imported different photos on my laptop AND desktop,
and I would like to centralize everything to one machine. What's the
best way to go about transferring all the photos and metadata from one
machine to another?
thanks
-khc
Ka-Hing,
unfortunately this is a significant limitation in Shotwell today:
there's no easy way to merge two databases and all their metadata. I've
created a ticket saying we should create a command or tool that can do that:
http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/3393
Shotwell today can write certain metadata (tags, titles and date/time)
to photo (but not video) files. So in one instance of Shotwell, you can
enable the metadata writing option (found in the preferences dialog).
Once metadata writing is complete, you can copy all those files to the
machine containing the other Shotwell database and import them there.
Shotwell will read metadata from those files. So that means that you
*can* effectively merge tags and titles.
The Shotwell database also includes all edits that you have made to each
photo. If you have edited some photos, you can export them from one
instance of Shotwell (via File->Export) which will write out new JPEG
files containing all your edit changes. You can then import those new
copies into the other Shotwell instance. That way you'll get the visual
changes, although you'll lose the metadata indicating those changes, so
in the new Shotwell instance if you open the Adjust dialog you won't see
the values you had set there in the first instance, unfortunately.
Finally, the Shotwell database also records the event which each photo
belongs to. Unfortunately there's no way to export that information today.
In the long term, I'd like Shotwell to be able to (optionally) store all
metadata (including event membership and photo edits) in sidecar files
for both photos and videos. These sidecar files would probably be in
XMP format. In that world, the Shotwell database would simply be a
cache of observed metadata. And so you'd be able to merge two databases
simply by dragging and dropping all photos/videos along with their
sidecar files. But making everything happen that way is a large project
and probably won't happen soon.
adam
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