All albums are removed if there is a network disconnection

[Karl Günter Wünsch]

On 30.01.18 18:11, Remco Viëtor wrote:
> But a local file *cannot* be "unavailable just for a short moment",
And here I beg to differ. What if I move the files to another mounted 
drive? Still available but no longer in the place they were before. And 
IIRC some information aren't stored in the sidecar files but rather in 
the almost completely inaccessible (and ignored by most backup solutions 
as well as many tools implementing file system operations) extended 
attributes as the semantic desktop mandates, it's a pain to try and keep 
those information with the original files if at all possible (the 
networked drives don't support extended attributes and neither does the 
NTFS driver (even though that concept is available there too)...

That mindset you just expressed has driven me away from digikam (after I 
ran into similar issues years ago - I honestly thought they had been 
addressed) and into the arms of the subscription of a commercial DAM 
(along with a switch to first Windows and then after a while to MacOS) - 
because they (unlike digikam) have embraced the concept that any 
information in the DAM should persist until such a time when the user 
actively chooses to remove it. There, even if I remove a file, move it 
to another drive, move it to a NAS or anything else - yes it will lose 
original file but it will show me that that connection has been broken 
and I can go ahead and reestablish it - I will not lose any information 
stored in the database.

Why can't digikam do the same thing? If the file goes missing, amend the 
still existing preview with an icon telling the user that the original 
has vanished. If he then wants to do something with the original prompt 
him with the file dialog so that he can locate the original and thus 
regain access to it. If a whole folder has gone missing (by for example 
renaming to reflect the location) then locating one file would 
automatically reestablish database connection for the rest. That way 
digikam would be much more robust, it just doesn't bode well if the 
database information are still lost so easily...