[Shotwell] Import questions

[David Velazquez]

*Seems I forgot to send this to the whole list as first, sorry for the
dupes.*

Hey Jon! I'm just a lowly user, but let me see if I can answer a few of your
questions. As an amateur point and shooter I'm not the heaviest Shotwell
user so my methods might not be the most efficient out there, but they work.

1. I still use USB from camera -> Computer. On the rare occasion I have a
video file I can navigate through the cards directories in Nautilus and just
drag and drop the video file. The issue of importing video files has been
ticketed here <http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/855> (at least I think that's
the right one). It's currently labeled as priority medium which I believe
means it won't be introduced in .6, the next release. Somewhere in here
recently it was said that they were trying to get everything with priority
high into the next release, though that might not happen.

2. That might be a bug. I thought at the very least it would create
~/Pictures for you. Shotwell does organize files in year/month/day format
though, so at the very least it's doing that correctly. A ticket has been
created to allow users to specify where to save photos. That ticket is here:
http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/1075

Looking at the ticket I see it was closed and fixed in the last two days by
Allison, so perhaps this will be making it into .6.

3. I think I agree with pretty much everything that happened. :)

I just read that you read through the tickets and I apologize if I was
restating information you already know after reading. Hopefully I've picked
the right tickets that answered your questions.

Dave

On Fri, May 28, 2010 at 5:19 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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