[Shotwell] Photos not getting copied to photo library...

[Adam Dingle]

Doug,

On 06/14/2010 08:53 AM, Douglas Stanley wrote:
> I had an Ubuntu box, and I installed shotwell. I imported a few
> thousand photos, and everything was fine. Then I had hard drive
> issues. I copied the photos, and the shotwell db files over to another
> machine. I started up shotwell, and everything looked fine.
>
> Then I tried to import new photos, and it refuses to copy them to the
> photo library. It just puts the location to where I imported them from
> in the shotwell db (I confirmed this by looking at the db file with
> sqliteman).
>
> When importing, I made sure the "copy files to library" box was
> checked, but it doesn't seem to make any difference! Has anyone else
> come across this?
>    

If you import photo files which are *already* in your Shotwell library 
directory, then Shotwell will not copy them even if "copy files to 
library" is checked.  So this is almost certainly the case.  If you're 
using Shotwell 0.5, then your library directory is always the XDG 
Pictures directory.  Look at the definition of XDG_PICTURES_DIR in 
~/.config/user-dirs.dirs.  If for some reason it is set to your home 
directory, then Shotwell will believe that all imported photos are 
already in the library and will never copy them.

If you've built Shotwell from trunk (soon to become 0.6) then the 
situation is a little better: you can use Edit->Preferences to view and 
change the library directory.  Furthermore, the trunk build will warn 
you if your library directory is your home directory since that's 
probably not what you want.

I hope this helps!

adam