[Digikam-users] Copying albums

[Sonja]

I have:
* Internal hard drive on my laptop with just under 30,000 photos 
(about 135Gb). They are mostly raw (Canon .cr2 files) and some have 
tags associated with them in the database.

* External usb hard drive.

Because I'm running out of space on my internal hard drive and I 
sometimes want to work on my photos on a friends computer I would like 
to copy my photos to the external drive while remembering the tags.

The Digikam .db files will stay on my internal drive, the unproven 
theory is it will run faster and I read somewhere not to put them on a 
remote file system.

In a file browser I copied my photos dir to the external drive then 
added it as a collection to digikam, then deleted the original 
collection reference in digikam and lost my tags <oops> I restored a 
backup .db.

Next I tried making a dir on the external drive, adding it as 
collection in digikam and then using the album view panel in digikam 
to drag and drop the directories but there was only the option of 
moving them and I want to copy.

I'm not very keen on tampering with the original file so I don't want 
to save the tags in the meta data. (Eagerly awaiting digikam 2.0 with 
sidecar files next year. :-)

I'm unsure what to try next, any suggestions?

From Help>About I'm running:
Version 1.2.0
Using KDE Development Platform 4.4.2 (KDE 4.4.2)

Sonja