[digiKam-users] Moving / Sharing collection between external HD and internal HD

[Warren Baird]

On Thu, 14 Oct 2021 at 18:44, Daniel Bauer <linux at daniel-bauer.com> wrote:

>
>
> Am 14.10.21 um 03:40 schrieb Warren Baird:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I've done a bunch of googling, and have not been able to find any
> > answers for this, so hopefully someone here can help.
> >
> > For the past few years I've been using digikam on a laptop (running
> > Linux Mint) to manage a collection on an external HD.   I recently built
> > a desktop PC (also running Linux Mint) that has a big enough internal
> > disk and I'd like to copy the collection from the external drive to the
> > internal drive.
> >
> > I found a thread from 2015 talking about moving a collection from one
> > internal disk to another, and it sounds like if you remove the internal
> > disk and add a new disk with the same path, it should 'just work'...
> >   but since it's an external drive I can't figure out how to make that
> work.
> >
> > Any suggestions?
> >
> > Ideally in fact, I'd like a way to basically 'share' or 'mirror' the
> > collection between the internal and external drives - if I'm travelling
> > (assuming that ever happens again), I'd like to be able to sync the
> > internal drive with the external drive, use it with my laptop during the
> > trip, and then sync all the changes again after the trip...
> >
> > Is there any way to achieve that?
> >
> > Thanks in advance!!!
> >
> > Warren
>
> Hi Warren,
>
> Just to copy (or faster: rsync) the files from external to internal is
> no problem. Just make an albums-root directory in the new computer and
> point to it in the settings of the new digikam (if you also want to copy
> the database files point to the directory when you want to have them in
> digikam settings). Then copy/rsync and images files/folders to that
> rootalbum-folder and database files to their folder. (digikam closed).
>
> It should already work when you open digikam the next time.
>

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for your advice - that seems to have worked!   But I have to admit
I'm not entirely sure how my metadata was preserved...   I was expecting to
have to do some kind of mapping telling digikam that the old path
(/media/warren/seagate/...) should map to the new path (/data/...)   is the
metadata just associated with a relative path compared to the root of the
'album' or something?

I think your proposal for syncing is more complex than I need - I won't be
making updates to both systems and need to merge them - what I'd like to be
able to do is rsync my internal drive to the external drive, copy my
digikam db to my laptop, and then for a week or two be able to add new
photos to the external drive, tag them, etc. - then when I get back home,
rsync the photos from the external drive to the internal drive on my
desktop, copy the digikam db to my desktop and then have the new photos and
metadata available on my desktop.

it seems to me that since the bulk copy I just did worked, then I might be
able to just do what I describe above and have it work also...

Do you think that's likely to work?

Thanks,

Warren

-- 
Warren Baird - warren at warrenbaird.ca
Photographer, Digital Artist, Jeweler
http://beautifulscience.ca
https://www.instagram.com/warren_beautifulscience/
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