[Digikam-users] How do I set up Digikam for network access by multiple users ?

[tim.jenness]

On Sep 15, 2009, at 11:49 AM, Linuxguy123 wrote:

> On Tue, 2009-09-15 at 15:41 -0400, Brano wrote:
>> I have a same situation, all my photos are on NFS share, my digikam  
>> DB
>> is on my desktop local.
>> My wife has also the share mounted and needs to be able to tag the
>> pictures for printing/sending to various friends.
>
> At least I'm not the only one with this need.
>

I use picasa at work from an rsynced directory so always write  
metadata to files.

>>
>> I'm planning to implement this (once I get to re-install my wife's  
>> laptop).
>>
>> 1) Keep all photos on NFS (or CIFS) share ...mounted to me and my  
>> wife
>> (I have complete backup copy elsewhere)
>> 2) Keep my digikam DB on my desktop
>> 3) Let my wife have digikam on her laptop with local DB
>> 4) She'll be tagging pics and digikam will save the tags to exif  
>> info of
>> each photo (as well as her local digikam db)
>> 5) Then I can re-scan the pics on my PC and get all the tags from  
>> exif
>> and process further as instructed (by her :))
>>
>> By this I'll get (somehow) the two DBs in sync ...at minimal I'll get
>> the info I need from her to my db.
>
> Hmmm...  I'm skeptical that this will work (without issues).  Can
> someone who has done it comment ?   If everything is stored in the  
> EXIF
> tag field, what does DigiKam need a db for ?  Obviously lots of  
> things.
>
> Why can't a DigiKam application connect to a remote db, other than for
> reasons of concurrent access ?  I wouldn't have a problem ensuring  
> that
> my wife and I aren't both using DigiKam at the same time.
>
> Thanks for the replies !
>

The database is much much faster than having to scan the directory  
each time someone asks for a tag. There is also the problem with video  
files that can't be tagged yet (I'm hoping that Exiv2 will eventually  
handle those). I think that the idea of sharing the photos but using  
local databases would work well. Syncing up the database from the EXIF  
data in the files will work well.

-- 
Tim Jenness