[Digikam-users] How does one use digikam source for casual testing?

[Paul Waldo]

Thanks for the reply, Lawrence. 

There are two main scenarios that I'm concerned about. The first is immediate and obvious image trashing. I do maintain backups; I have bacula write backups to a separate server every night. So, if the new software immediately trashes all my photos, I *could* restore them. I would certainly prefer to avoid that situation, though. 

The second scenario is much more insidious. Let's say that a bug causes image corruption that is not immediately obvious. Your image thumbnails look fine but, unbeknown to you, the bug has truncated your original image file. Imagine the feeling of dread when, seven months from now, you go to print that priceless image of your child as an infant, only to find out that image has a file size of zero. My backups only live for six months, so I'm out of luck. 

I know that with digital images, there is a certain amount of faith in both the hardware and software used to store and manipulate images. I've been in this business too long to have blind faith, though :-) 

What I would like to be able to do is take a subset of my images, make copies in separate location, and test the new software with those images. I'm afraid though that if I just fire up new software, it will look for the existing configuration, and start processing my real (not test) images. Is there any way to have "non-production" digikam use a different album root? 

Paul 

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Lawrence Plug" <ljp at dal.ca> 
To: "digiKam - Digital Photo Management for the masses" <digikam-users at kde.org> 
Sent: Thursday, May 8, 2008 11:48:11 AM (GMT-0500) America/New_York 
Subject: Re: [Digikam-users] How does one use digikam source for casual testing? 

Hi Paul, 

I'm using the latest beta of 0.9.4 and find it very stable. It 
hasn't done anything nasty :-). I kept 0.9.3 which comes in my 
linux distribution's repositories, but never use it now 
that I have 0.9.4. Your mileage may vary of course. 

I wouldn't do it without backups (but of course we should have 
those anyway, beta program or not). I have about 400GB 
of photos managed by digikam, and mainly use unison (very handy 
backup utility) to maintain a local mirror of my image tree on a 
USB hard drive, and also a mirror on my server at work. In 
addition, DVD backups sporadically. 

cheers 
L 



On Thu, May 08, 2008 at 11:26:53AM -0400, Paul Waldo wrote: 
> Hi all, 
> 
> I have finally gotten digikam to compile from source, but I am hesitating 
> before running it. I would like to check out the bleeding edge features, but I 
> certainly don't want an obscure bug walking through my image tree deleting 
> every image in sight. :-O I also want to maintain a stable version for 
> day-to-day use. 
> 
> So, for those who have their feet in both the stable and beta worlds, how do 
> you do it without worrying about bugs permanently removing your priceless 
> photos? Thanks for any tips! 
> 
> Paul 

> _______________________________________________ 
> Digikam-users mailing list 
> Digikam-users at kde.org 
> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/digikam-users 

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