[Digikam-users] Syncing Digikam collections and databases between different computers

[Mick Sulley]

Hi Jonathan,

Yes I raised this when I started using DigiKam, as far as I know there 
is no proper fix.  If you just accept at the message it works OK, just 
takes a little time.  It is also possible to add a database script to 
fix it, here is an answer that I received to that question back in 
2013.  I never got around to creating the script, I just accept when asked.


On Wed, 20 Feb 2013, Mick Sulley wrote:

> Hi,
>
> When I sync my album between laptop and desktop I get a message when I 
> open it on the destination machine saying that the collection is 
> available but the identifier has changed.
>
> I have looked in the database on each machine and it seems that the 
> problem is that the AlbumRoots table is slightly different, the 
> identifier field is different -
> desktop = "volumeid:?uuid=bf835257-ad63-4580-9692-9d2600740cd1"
> laptop = "volumeid:?uuid=2a6a238c-c404-46b6-886f-873683917b9c"
>
> It does seem to be OK if I just accept the message and continue, but 
> is there any way to stop it happening?  Is it likely to cause any 
> problems?

Hi Mick,

Well, this is an old issue, often discussed on this list.
Identifying disk devices by UUID, instead of mount pathname as it should
be - at least on Unix platforms - makes the database hardware dependant.

Same problem occurs if you manage your collections on USB drives, even on
the same machine. Changing a drive by a backup drive, or replacing an old
drive by a new one with a mirror copy of collections will also change the
physical device UUID.

The (dirty) fix to work around sync problems is to use small scripts to
make the transfert, e.g. using rsync, then update the database from
SQL command line tool and issue things like that :
UPDATE albumroots SET identifier = 'volumeid:?uuid= new UUID'
  WHERE identifier = 'volumeid:?uuid = old UUID';

Jean-François

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