[digiKam-users] SD card import on a Mac

[Gilles Caulier]

Hi all,

I will give more technical details about media support under MAC (but also
under Windows and Linux).

All platform supported by digiKam use the same software interface to manage
media (internal or external). This include hard-drive, SDD, read-only
media, SDCard, etc. this interface ins named Solid and come from KDE
framework (KF5).

https://solid.kde.org/
https://api.kde.org/frameworks/solid/html/

There is no other Qt alternative that i know which give the same
functionalities that we use in digiKam, as :

- media discovery
- removal media detection on the fly (See Import menu form album view).
- media properties (UUID used to register collection in database).

Solid work well under Linux. A port to Windows and MacOS exists and work in
some cases but not all. This depend of plenty cases not registered in API
and depending of device ID detected. For example, older devices can be not
registered in the internal list used by Solid.

See my screenshot just taken une OSX Mojave from my Macbook-pro 2012 with
digiKam 6.1.0 pre install package :

https://i.imgur.com/t1MQtBM.png

Look the Import Menu and the KF5 version used to compile digiKam : 5.51.
The current stable is 5.55 and this include Solid. I need to rebuild the
bundle with this version in case of some improvements and fixes have been
included.

One year ago,  a KDE developer named René J Bertin (RJVB) using exclusively
MACOS has contacted me to see if i can test a big patch about to support
Mac devices under digiKam. He provide a lots of changes in Solid
implementation to use more recent Apple SDK and fix missing use cases under
MacOS. See this thread for details :

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=393416

Note that the bugzilla entry still open as all use cases depending of all
Apple devices are not yet covered by the Solid implementation.

Voilà you know all the details. If you have dysfunction under MacOSX with a
removable media, please post your comment on Bug #393416 where René is in
CC.

Best

Gilles Caulier


Le dim. 17 févr. 2019 à 23:12, Mark Otway <mark at otway.com> a écrit :

> Interesting. The thread I linked to explicitly says that KDE doesn't
> support it. Where does it appear for you in the import menu?
>
> On Sun, 17 Feb 2019, 22:09 J Albrecht <heviiguy at gmail.com wrote:
>
>> I think that your problems are unique. It’s always been functioning
>> perfectly well over here on my MBPro.
>>
>> On 17 Feb 2019, at 16:46, Mark Otway <mark at otway.com> wrote:
>>
>> I just tried to import photos for the first time and found that the
>> MacBook SD card slot isn't recognised. Seems this is a know problem:
>>
>> http://digikam.1695700.n4.nabble.com/Importing-on-a-Mac-td4690370.html
>>
>> That thread was a couple of years ago. Is there any likelihood of a fix
>> soon? Seems like a bit of a functional gap....
>>
>>
>>
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