[Shotwell] Import questions

[Adam Dingle]

On 05/28/2010 02:19 PM, Jon Hamkins wrote:
> 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.
>    

I'd like to explain a little more thoroughly what presumably happened 
here.  As Jim explained in his previous message, if you delete 
~/Pictures then the GNOME desktop may reset the XDG Pictures directory 
to be ~.  More specifically, if you delete ~/Pictures and then log out 
and log back in again, then the XDG Pictures directory (which appears in 
~/.config/user-dirs.dirs) will be reset to ~ (at least on Ubuntu 10.04, 
but probably on other distros as well).  If that happens, then Shotwell 
will believe that the library directory is your home directory, which is 
not a good state to be in: as you saw it will create directories such as 
~/2010.  Furthermore, the checkbox for copying files to your photo 
library will have no effect because Shotwell will believe that all 
imported file are *already* in the photo library, so it will decline to 
copy them.

It might be nice if Shotwell would warn the user if the library 
directory is ~ and suggest that the user set it to something else (which 
is now easy to do, since the trunk build lets the user specify the 
library directory in the Preferences dialog).  I've created a ticket for 
this at http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/2031 .

adam