[Digikam-users] Re: Changing Digikam environment

[Martin (KDE)]

Am Samstag, 23. Oktober 2010 schrieb Marie-Noëlle Augendre:
> I intend to switch quite soon from Ubuntu to Fedora (Digikam 1.5 is
> already available with this distro).
> This will be the first time I'll desinstall a system to put another
> one in its place. Is there anything I should know before doing
> that, or will Digikam work "straight out of the box" with the new
> distribution and my current images?

If your path to the photos and your home files do not change, you will 
not see any difference, it will run out of the box.

If you loose your home data, you loose all data only stored in the 
digikam database only (like tags that are not stored in the photos 
itself - this can be enabled/disabled in the configuration).

I am not really sure what happens, if the path to your photos changes. 
In theory digikam can link the internal data to the newly scanned 
photos (afaik digikam stores a checksum for every photo calculated 
form the first n bytes) but if this work in praxis? I never tried it.

> 
> Additionally, as I will have two different computers with the same
> distribution, can I move my images and database to an external
> drive so I can use it with either computer?

Yes this is possible. I have all my photos on a server (access via 
NFS) and the user based digikam files are stored on the fileserver as 
well but are restored at every login to the local computer and copied 
back to the server if I logout. Once I accessed all my data via NFS, 
but I was told not to do so, as database files may get corrupted if NFS 
has a little failure.

So, for your external drive you can configure your digikam to store the 
database to the external drive side by side with the photos. But 
digikam will not work, if the external hard disk is not attached. If 
you want/have to share your photos with others (like family members) 
it may be a good idea to setup a small server for sharing not only 
photos.

Martin

> 
> Thanks for answers,
> Marie-Noëlle