[Shotwell] Importing Tags

[Jim Nelson]

We don't have an API or a plug-in system yet (although those are things we
are considering for future releases).

The easiest thing -- and I feel the "right" way to do this -- would be for
Kphotoalbum to write those tags into the photo files themselves as IPTC
tags.  (There may be other open mechanisms for this, but that is the most
obvious and widespread.)  We are planning for Shotwell 0.6 to read those
tags at import time and automatically tag the photos internally.  With all
this in place, everything Would Just Work.

Since it doesn't sound like Kphotoalbum writes tags to the photo files, and
Shotwell doesn't read them yet, the solution's not straightforward.  A
long-term solution is to think in terms of migration, not merely data
conversion; we have tickets to offer F-Spot migration, for example.  I would
suggest you ticket Kphotoalbum migration as well, if this is important to
you.

I can't in good conscious recommend you update the internal database
directly, as we're treating that as a private persistent data store -- the
schema could alter at any time, and for that matter, we might remove SQLite
and go with another system.

But if you *were* to update it directly, you would (a) need to make those
updates with Shotwell not running, and (b) have to import the photo files
without copying them into the library, as I bet Kphotoalbum's data file uses
absolute file paths.  I would also recommend saving a backup of your
~/.shotwell directory.

If you look in Shotwell's source, in DatabaseTables.vala, you'll get an idea
of how the database is laid out and how the TagTable is tied to the other
tables.

-- Jim

On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 7:22 PM, Tony Willoughby <tonyw at pobox.com> wrote:

>
> I don't think Kphotoalbum exports IPTC tags (I don't think that would
> serve my purposes as I'm interested in the tags I added myself).
>
> I'm a programmer and could probably help out.  Is there an existing API
> into Shotwell?  Or perhaps a structure how to set values directly into
> SQLite?
>
>
>
>
>
> Adam Dingle wrote:
> > Tony,
> >> I've just started playing with 0.5.0 and it's pretty impressive.
> >>
> >
> > Thanks!
> >
> >> I've been using kphotoalbum for several years now and have nearly 9000
> >> images tagged with events, people, places, etc.
> >>
> >> I'd love to make the switch to shotwell, but I can't afford to loose all
> >> those tags.  Kphoto stores tags in XML, is it possible to import these
> >> into
> >> shotwell?
> >>
> >>
> >
> > It's not yet possible to import these tags into Shotwell,
> > unfortunately.  Within the next couple of releases we hope to be able to
> > import from IPTC tags embedded in photo files (see
> > http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/1290).  I don't know whether KPhotoAlbum
> > can export IPTC tags, however.  A Web search for [kphotoalbum iptc]
> > reveals that there has been some work in that direction, but I don't
> > know whether it's made it into the shipping KPhotoAlbum.
> >
> > In theory we could implement KPhotoAlbum-specific importing in
> > Shotwell.  Feel free to file a ticket for that if you like, though I
> > think we would definitely prioritize that below importing from IPTC
> > tags, which are supported by many photo applications.
> >
> > adam
> >
>
> --
> Tony Willoughby   tonyw at pobox.com
> "Bill Clinton and Yalmulke Lewinski"
> -My 4 year old son describing his parents'
>  Halloween costumes to his teacher.
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