[digiKam-users] Scan for new items without removing deleted albums

[Remco Viëtor]

On vendredi 18 octobre 2019 16:02:03 CEST photo at whil.eu wrote:
> Thanks, unfortunately refresh of the album also removes photos of that
> album.
> 
> I would also need a way to discover new albums in a collection without
> removing previously existing albums
> October 18, 2019 3:33 PM, "woenx" <marcpalaus at hotmail.com> wrote:
> > Mmm, have you tried right-clicking on one album and selecting refresh? New
> > pictures in that album will be imported, I think. Otherwise it just syncs
> > digikam with the directory structure and file contents.

Digikam tries very hard to keep its database in sync with the underlying 
filesystem, so it's not too much disturbed by changes to the albums from 
outside Digikam. That means: adding new images to the database, but also 
removing from the database pictures that are removed from the underlying 
directories.

What you want seems to go against that principle...


What might work is declaring the cloud collection as a removable collection. 
Afaik that allows you to use the database to search that collection even when 
it's not available, as database and thumbnails are stored on your local 
machine.

You then copy images you need to work on to a local non-removable collection. 
Copy to avoid removing them from the database for the removable collection.

This will only work if you are the only user that can modify the image 
collection on the cloud, and you manage all the copying through Digikam: in 
that case, you can disable the "check for new images on startup", avoiding a 
full scan of the cloud collection. If images can be added from outside 
Digikam, you may have problems, though... (new images not showing up).

If you indeed need to know which images have been passed through your local 
machine, you could use a tag or colour label.

Note that *creating* the database for the cloud collection can take a very 
long time. As long as you manage to do all the copying between cloud and local 
storage through digikam, subsequent operations should be much faster (but 
inherently slow, as there's network transport involved).