[Shotwell] Import questions

[Jim Nelson]

I think David answered most of your concerns, but I'll add two more
things you that are pertinent here.

The reason Shotwell didn't create ~/Pictures when it was missing is
because of the behavior of the GNOME VDG user directories
implementation.  If you delete ~/Pictures, the GNOME desktop will
internally reset its default pictures location to ~.  Shotwell is
simply using the value GNOME is reporting to us -- we can't tell if
this has happened because you deleted the folder or you intentionally
set it to ~.  I agree this isn't the best behavior possible; some of
this is addressed in the ticket David mentioned (#1075).

The question of moving photos and having Shotwell track them is
something we're considering for 0.7: http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/374
Although this is listed as auto-import, what we're actually
envisioning is Shotwell monitoring the local filesystem and reflecting
all changes.

-- Jim

On Fri, May 28, 2010 at 2:19 PM, Jon Hamkins <hamkins at alumni.caltech.edu> wrote:
> Hi, I'm a long time RH and Fedora user, and first-time shotwell user.
> First, let me offer congratulations to the shotwell development team on
> a great looking photo organizer -- this will be a really nice tool for
> me, once I figure out a few things.
>
> 1. In importing from a camera card, shotwell ignored the video files on
> the camera (telling me so -- good).  This is understandable for a photo
> organizer, but it does make shotwell not such a great default tool for
> how I operate.  I only attach a camera card when I want to dump all data
> and erase the card.  How do others handle this issue of video files not
> getting copied to the computer?  I was thinking of reverting to gthumb
> as the default application when a camera card is attached to the
> computer (which copies both images and videos), and then importing the
> new hard-drive directory into shotwell to take advantage of shotwell's
> superior photo organization capabilities.
>
> 2.  Incidentally, when I connected a camera and let shotwell import the
> pictures, it seems to have created the directory ~/2010 and put the
> pictures there.  Is this the expected behavior when no ~/Pictures/
> directory is present?  This is, well, weird.  Shouldn't there be an
> option to specify where to copy the images?
>
> 3.  Starting over (deleting ~/.shotwell, and creating ~/Pictures), I
> imported a directory of pictures already on my hard drive into shotwell,
> keeping the checkbox checked for copying files to my "photo library".
> But, if I move/rename the original directory of images, shotwell
> complains that they are missing, and the extended information indicates
> that shotwell is looking for the images in their original location.  So,
> it only seems to have *linked* to the pictures, not copied them to
> ~/Pictures (which remained empty).  In fact, the import seems to behave
> the same way whether or not I check the copy checkbox.
>
> Incidentally, I've read through the shotwell tickets, and I agree with
> Adam's comment on #1602, that by default, it is the right thing to link
> images already on the hard drive and copy images on a removable drive.
> Maybe I'll stick to that approach, and be careful never move/rename
> anything in that directory structure.
>
>      ----Jon
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