[Digikam-users] Shared collection / old feature request

[Vlado Plaga]

Am Tue, 8 Jun 2010 17:57:55 +0200
schrieb Marcel Wiesweg <marcel.wiesweg at gmx.de>:

> > At the moment I don't even know how to properly use digikam on two
> > different operating systems (Linux and Mac OS) with just one user (on
> > just one computer).

[...]

> For this (and other) reasons digikam normally stores collections by the 
> partitions UUID. That means, if KDE Solid is properly implemented on Mac OS X 
> - I dont know if it is - you should be able to use the same database file and 
> photo directories, on a partition accessed by both OSs.
> Make backups and try...it works or not ;-)

For almost two months I have hardly been using digiKam at all, but
finally I managed to test this. Short version: it works indeed! :-)

Unfortunately the UUID scheme does not work on my system, under Mac OS,
but with some SQLite database software (I used the Firefox add-on
SQLite Manager[1] on Mac OS and sqlitebrowser[2] on Linux) I found out
I could just work with directory paths instead:

In the table "AlbumRoots" I changed "identifier" from the Linux
database's UUID version to

"volumeid:?path=%2Fdaten%2Fdigicam".

"specificPath" then has to be just "/".

My pictures were in "/daten/digicam" under Linux, and in
"/Volumes/daten/digicam" under Mac OS. I simply created a
symlink "/daten" to "/Volumes/daten" under Mac OS, and now I can share
the same "digikam4.db" on both systems! I created a hardlink with "ln"
for that purpose, but I suppose a softlink ("ln -s") would also do the
job...

I even deactivated all "write metadata to images" options, for this
makes digikam operate a lot smother on my old machine. Now I just need
to make sure I backup digikam4.db regularly...

Regards,
Vlado

[1] http://code.google.com/p/sqlite-manager/ 
[2] http://sqlitebrowser.sourceforge.net/


-- 

       Vlado Plaga                        __o
    http://vlado-do.de                 _o/\<,_
    update: 2010-07-03                 (U)/ (u)
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