[Shotwell] External HD not connected - Lost all events & tags

[Matthias Adrian Mendler]

Hey,

my father has a lot of pictures, an old notebook, so I was really happy
about shotwell. Nice & simple. He finally seems to get the difference to
"normal" folders and getting used to the idea of events and tags.
Especially since I am tagging and ordering his 30k pictures for him :)

The problem right now is, that his pictures are on an external hard
disk. He once started shotwell without it being connected to the
notebook. Obviously they appeared in missing folders. After it was
plugged back and shotwell restarted, all pictures are back, not in
missing files anymore - but all the events and tags are gone. The only
thing shotwell remembers is which pictures I imported last :/

Is there any way to restore that? I didn't find really anything about
this subject. The closest thing was someone moving/renaming his folder
and the solution was just moving it back. Won't this work with external
hard disks?

I should mention, that the external hard disks picture folder is linked
to the picture folder in the home.

Thanks a lot, I see your program is still heavily in development, and it
looks very promising. 加油

Matthias

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[gimi]

Hello Matthias,

I got the same problem with storing the pictures on a separate partition
which is not mounted at session startup. All the work of arranging is
destroyed by not thinking about if the source media is mounted or not.

One workaround could be to save the shotwell configuration at the same
place like the photos. If the drive is not available, there's no
configuration to be messed up by shotwell, too. This way it can also be
backed up easily.

The steps are like:

- quit shotwell, mount the drive
- mv ~/.shotwell /media/YOUR_DRIVE/path/to/photos
- ln -s /media/YOUR_DRIVE/path/to/photos/.shotwell ~/.shotwell
- run shotwell and see if everything is in its place


regards

gimi

On 11/17/2010 10:30 PM, Matthias Adrian Mendler wrote:

> Hey,
>
> my father has a lot of pictures, an old notebook, so I was really happy
> about shotwell. Nice&  simple. He finally seems to get the difference to
> "normal" folders and getting used to the idea of events and tags.
> Especially since I am tagging and ordering his 30k pictures for him :)
>
> The problem right now is, that his pictures are on an external hard
> disk. He once started shotwell without it being connected to the
> notebook. Obviously they appeared in missing folders. After it was
> plugged back and shotwell restarted, all pictures are back, not in
> missing files anymore - but all the events and tags are gone. The only
> thing shotwell remembers is which pictures I imported last :/
>
> Is there any way to restore that? I didn't find really anything about
> this subject. The closest thing was someone moving/renaming his folder
> and the solution was just moving it back. Won't this work with external
> hard disks?
>
> I should mention, that the external hard disks picture folder is linked
> to the picture folder in the home.
>
> Thanks a lot, I see your program is still heavily in development, and it
> looks very promising. 加油
>
> Matthias
>
> _______________________________________________
> Shotwell mailing list
> [hidden email]
> http://lists.yorba.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/shotwell

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[yorba-jim]

This should never happen with Shotwell and we regard it as a serious bug.  I
have reproduced a related bug where files on an external drive get marked
offline and never come back, but that's different from your problem:
http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/2857  In general, you should never lose events
and tags (and other metadata) simply because the photo has been marked
offline.

I'd like to know more specifics about how your father's system is
configured.  It sounds like there's a soft link in his ~/Pictures directory
that points to the external hard drive.  Do you recall how you imported the
photos into Shotwell?  Shotwell does not explicitly support soft links,
which means if you imported ~/Pictures or the soft link, Shotwell will not
traverse it.  I'm guessing you imported from the drive, i.e. dragging in a
folder like this:

/home/dad/Pictures/soft-link/MyPhotos

And not directly from the external drive path, i.e.:

/media/ExternalDrive/MyPhotos

Shotwell won't detect that soft-link is a soft link and will import
everything from MyPhotos on down.  An easy way to verify this is to click on
one of the files and then View -> Extended Infomation.  The filename is the
path Shotwell uses.

But at this point if I unplug the drive and re-plug it back in, I run into
the problem I mentioned earlier (http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/2857).
Examining the database shows me that the tags and events are preserved.  In
other words, if we fix this bug, I think everything will work.

So I must be missing something here.  I would like to reproduce this problem
so we can fix it.  Is there anything else about the setup that you've not
mentioned, or other steps that occurred before this happened?

Also, what version of Shotwell is this?

-- Jim

On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 1:30 PM, Matthias Adrian Mendler <
[hidden email]> wrote:

> Hey,
>
> my father has a lot of pictures, an old notebook, so I was really happy
> about shotwell. Nice & simple. He finally seems to get the difference to
> "normal" folders and getting used to the idea of events and tags.
> Especially since I am tagging and ordering his 30k pictures for him :)
>
> The problem right now is, that his pictures are on an external hard
> disk. He once started shotwell without it being connected to the
> notebook. Obviously they appeared in missing folders. After it was
> plugged back and shotwell restarted, all pictures are back, not in
> missing files anymore - but all the events and tags are gone. The only
> thing shotwell remembers is which pictures I imported last :/
>
> Is there any way to restore that? I didn't find really anything about
> this subject. The closest thing was someone moving/renaming his folder
> and the solution was just moving it back. Won't this work with external
> hard disks?
>
> I should mention, that the external hard disks picture folder is linked
> to the picture folder in the home.
>
> Thanks a lot, I see your program is still heavily in development, and it
> looks very promising. 加油
>
> Matthias
>
> _______________________________________________
> Shotwell mailing list
> [hidden email]
> http://lists.yorba.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/shotwell
>

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[gustible]

I experienced the same problem - the external HD on which my photos are stored was unmounted. Without realising this, I started Shotwell. All the event-photo links were destroyed.
In the database, the eventid in the Photos table was set to -1 for every photo. Most events were still present in the events table - although not all.
This was on Shotwell 0.7.2 - the current version shipping with Ubuntu.
I wrote a script in Python (sorry) to recreate the events that were lost, or alternatively, to recover the lost events - feel free to use the (warrantyless) script - can be found here:http://www.gustible.com/2011/01/23/shotwell-a-script-to-fix-broken-events

[Adam Dingle]

gustible,

On 01/22/2011 10:44 PM, gustible wrote:

> I experienced the same problem - the external HD on which my photos are
> stored was unmounted. Without realising this, I started Shotwell. All the
> event-photo links were destroyed.
> In the database, the eventid in the Photos table was set to -1 for every
> photo. Most events were still present in the events table - although not
> all.
> This was on Shotwell 0.7.2 - the current version shipping with Ubuntu.
> I wrote a script in Python (sorry) to recreate the events that were lost, or
> alternatively, to recover the lost events - feel free to use the
> (warrantyless) script - can be found
> here:http://www.gustible.com/2011/01/23/shotwell-a-script-to-fix-broken-events

The ticket for this bug is http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/2968 .  A few
users have reported this, but unfortunately we're completely unable to
reproduce it at Yorba.  Can you try the following?

1. Start Shotwell with an empty library (e.g. 'shotwell -d ~/foo').
2. Import a couple of photos from your external hard drive.
3. Close Shotwell.
4. Unmount the external hard drive.
5. Start Shotwell again.

Are the event-photo links destroyed in this case?

adam

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