[Digikam-users] Shared collection

[Martin (KDE)]

Am Samstag, 5. Juni 2010 schrieb Remco Viëtor:
> on Saturday 05 June 2010, Martin (KDE) wrote:
> > Am Samstag, 5. Juni 2010 schrieb Emmanuel Lacour:
> > > Dear digikam users,
> > > 
> > > Does anyone knows if there is a way to configure digikam and
> > > collections so two users on the same computer can have their
> > > own collections, and a common one?
> > 
> > Yes, for sure.
> > 
> > Create as many collections as you want for your own and add one
> > let say in the folder /family/photo. Set permissions of this
> > folder that all users of a given group can access this folder
> > (for unix/linux: "chgrp family /family/photo" and perimission
> > "chmod 2775 /family/photo" - this assumes that the group family
> > already exists - and set umask of all users to 0002).
> > 
> > In the given folder all members of the family group have access
> > to the files. The users have to add the collection to their
> > digikam of course.
> 
> Does that mean there is one database per collection, on one
> database per user? 

There is one database per user.

> If the latter, several things could happen:
> - the databases for each user get out of sync (not too much of a
> problem probably if you rescans collections at start-up

You have to enable rescan at start-up. This I have enabled anyway, as 
I handle raw photos with ufraw. Digikam seems to recognise changes in 
the pictures and rescans the data.

> - if you write tags etc. to the image files, one user can easily
> overwrite the items set by the other user, who would then have
> information in his database that is different from the actual
> information in the files.

I see your problem and it is one. I have tested this and tag or 
caption changes don't get trough from one digikam user to another one. 
Even if you update the file timestamp on metadata change digikam of 
the other user will not update the metadata. I see this as a bug, 
isn't it?

> 
> So, indeed having a shared photo collection in itself is easy,
> whether Digikam can handle is correctly I'm not sure.

At the moment: No, digikam can not handle it automatically. You must 
reread metadata from files by hand.

I have most of my photos on my server (access via NFS) and share them 
with the rest of my family, but I must confess that they usually don't 
change anything (and don't use digikam). I am interested to get this 
fixed.

Martin