[Digikam-users] Difference between collection types

[Paul Waldo]

Hi Marcel, thanks for the reply.  

So, as I understand it, Digikam  
 * can say with certainty that a Removable Media is attached
 * uses some guess work to try and determine whether a Network Share is attached
 * always assumes that a Local Collection is available

So what happens if Digikam determines that a non-local resource is *not* available?  There must be different behavior based on the answer.  In previous versions of Digikam, the images would be removed from the database if they were not present.  Does Digikam keep them in the database then just work with thumbnails?

The reason I ask is that I have a complex setup and want to try to make it as transparent as possible.  Here is what I have:
 * images straight out of the camera stored on a NAS samba share.  The digikam database is stored here.
 * post-processed images stored on another share of the same NAS.
 * images being worked on stored on a local drive

I do most of my work on a laptop, which connects and disconnects from my network frequently.  What I would like to do is have three albums:
 * "Camera" for the digital negatives (raw files)
 * "Developed" for the images that have been post-processed
 * "Working" for the files local to my laptop that are in active development.

I envision the workflow looking something like this:
 1. Plug laptop into network
 2. KDE knows I'm connected to my network and makes available the two NAS samba shares
 3. Digikam is able to access all three albums
 4. Use Digikam to copy an image from either "Camera" or "Developed" to "Working".
 5. Disconnect from my network
 6. KDE sees the disconnect and removes the NAS shares from what it knows about
 7. Take the laptop to a nice quite place to do some image processing.
 8. Re-attach to my network and copy the image from "Working" album to "Developed" album


Do you have any tips for accomplishing this kind of setup?  Can KDE mount and umount shares based on the network connection?  How would I handle the digikam database?  This would be a dream setup if it can be accomplished!  Thanks!

Paul
----- "Marcel Wiesweg" <marcel.wiesweg at gmx.de> wrote:

> > Hi all,
> >
> > I have a somewhat complicated Album Collection setup that I am
> trying to
> > figure out. I'm wondering what are the differences between Local,
> Removable
> > Media and Network Share collections. It is my understanding that
> any
> > collection not residing on the local drive must be mounted before
> using it,
> > so I don't see what the distinction is. Thanks for any advice!
> 
> For removable devices we have a good API (Solid) which works (under
> Linux, not 
> or partially implemented under Windows) and helps us to know if a
> given device 
> is connected or not.
> For network collections, be it Samba, NFS or whatever, we have no such
> API at 
> all, we dont know if a given mount path is empty because it's empty or
> because 
> the collection is not mounted. Therefore, for network collections, the
> 
> algorithm is to check if a directory is empty, then it is not
> mounted.
> 
> Marcel
> 
> 
> >
> > Paul
> 
> 
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