[Digikam-users] Using digikam on two computers?

[Arnd Baecker]

On Fri, 16 Jun 2006, Turgut Durduran wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Let's keep up with the brainstorming, may be I can get
> to testing this out this week-end.

OK - I will stay tuned.

> > Yes, but maybe if one does an "intelligent" syncing
> > procedure it  might work.
>
> I was thinking of "unison"
> (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/) or some
> script based on rsync. What you describe below is
> doable if the users are careful.


Whatever the technical solution is, I think it is absolutely
necessary that this works without the two computers being
connected all the time.
of tags (which might still be ok, actually).



> >     *All these files are considered to be
> > unchangeable, including
> >      their tags etc. - all changes will be ignored*
>
> We can perhaps achieve this by changing the
> permissions on the files. Remove the "write
> permission" (chmod a-w) to avoid accidental
> overwrites.

That sounds good. However,
this won't prevent changes of tags/tags names
etc. in the digikam database
(which might not be transferred into the original
images on the main computer).


> > (4) Adding the changes back to the main computer:
> >
> >     (a) First add all additional tags into the main
> > digikam3.db        database
>
>
> If we make one further assumption that there will not
> be any changes on the main computer while the "laptop
> is in the field" , then we can just copy back the
> digikam3.db , is that correct?

yes - that should work, at
least I cannot see any problem at the moment
(maybe one could add some protection methods
which make sure that indeed no changes have been applied,
e.g. by an md5 checksum of the original database
which is compared before copying the new one over
the old one on the main computer)

> > Some problems/points:
> > ad (1):
> >    * Presently I only implemented something like
> > this for jpg
> >      - what about raw files?
> >      - what about tiff/png/...
>
> What is the problem with these? Resizing? I can write
> a script to resize most formats. I am not entirely
> sure but I think we can turn the raw files to "preview
> only" (the little tiff file attached to raw files).

No problem for tiff/png (more a reminder
to myself that I did not take care of them in my script yet)
For raw your suggestion sounds good: but the file
should have the same name as before the rescaling,
right? (otherwise we would become inconsistent
with the entries in the sqlite database)
Is this doable?

> >    * If one has changed Pictures on the main
> > machine,
> >      one does not want to re-create small-size
> > copies of
> >      all images again. So it should be possible to
> >      create the small size copies only for newer
> > files.
> >      (However, files could have become deleted,
> >      changed or moved - so this is not completely
> > trivial...)
>
> This would not work with unison. But a custom
> perl/shell script can take care of it.

Yes, that should be not too difficult.

Best, Arnd