On 03/22/2011 02:29 PM, Ka-Hing Cheung wrote:
On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 10:32, Adam Dingle<[email protected]> wrote:
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.
Thanks for the reply. For now, is there a way to copy the data from
one machine to another, and then invoke shotwell and tell it where to
look for a different data directory (photo + metadata)?
There are two relevant directories here:
- your library directory (typically $HOME/Pictures). This is where
newly imported photos are placed if you choose to copy them during import.
- your Shotwell database directory (typically $HOME/.shotwell). This
holds the Shotwell database, which includes the complete path to every
photo in your library. These photos may or may not be in the library
directory.
The -d option to Shotwell lets you specify an alternate database
directory to use. The library directory, however, is stored in GConf
and is used no matter which database directory you choose. We consider
this a bug, and would like each database directory to have a separate
library directory setting; see http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/2146 .
The easiest thing you can do is this:
1. Enable metadata writing on both source machines and let Shotwell
write out all metadata that it can here.
2. Copy the photo from both source machines to ~/Pictures on the
destination machine.
3. Start a new Shotwell library on the destination machine. Enable
auto-import or manually drag ~/Pictures in to import all the photos.
You'll lose all events and photo edits from before.
Or you can do this:
1. Copy the library directory and database directory from machine A to
the destination machine.
2. Copy the photos from machine B into ~/Pictures on the destination
machine.
3. Start Shotwell on the destination machine. Enable auto-import or
manually drag ~/Pictures in to import all the photos.
You'll lose all events and photo edits from machine B, but those from A
will be preserved.
Other variations are possible. I hope this makes things clear!
adam
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