On Fri, 30 Dec 2016 15:07:29 +0100, Romano Giannetti wrote:
> On 30/12/16 12:55, Stéphane Gourichon wrote:
> >
> > This can happen not only because of accessing photo collection from
> > different computers.
> >
> > Another reason: a photo collection on an external drive. Even on the
> > same computer, the mount point is not always the same. Reasons are
> > varied: USB device name changing depending on what was plugged since
> > boot, duplicate disks labels, USB device stuck then unplugged/replugged.
>
>
> I agree with Stepháne, here.
>
> I normally use DT on my photo collection, which is shared between my three
> computers (replicated, really). I have the "XMP first" option set up, and
> given that I went quite a lot of hoops to have the same paths, it
> sort-of-work.
>
> I see the option#3 below really interesting. Having the libraries
> per-collection, in the root directory, sounds great.
>
> Thanks and all of you, have a nice 2017 start --- double the nice for the
> developers, they deserve it!
I'd like a setting -- not simply a command line option -- to skip the
database altogether and just use sidecar files. I didn't find any
such setting in the current git master.
My workflow is to import all files from my camera into a fixed
location (/images/<camera>/dcim/...) mirroring the storage on the
camera. I manage my collection (something over 150K frames, 200K
including RAW/JPEG/processed RAW) with kphotoalbum ("kpa"). I
essentially treat this (currently about 1.8 TB) tree as write-once,
mirror it on my server, and keep multiple backups.
I use kpa to select which frames from a set I want, and export
symlinks to them into a scratch directory (~/NoBackup/<whatever>,
where <whatever> is usually a short, vaguely descriptive name that
often gets reused because I delete the directory after I'm done
processing). After I've processed all the images (which I name
img_xxxx_c1.jpg, _c2, etc) I copy the processed images and sidecars
back into my kpa tree adjacent to the master copy of the images.
The img_xxxx numbers will wrap around after 10K frames. I've never
shot 10K frames in a shoot, but 2500 (JPEG only!) when shooting a
basketball game isn't unusual (of which I select maybe 200). So if
there's a hidden database somewhere using pathnames, I'll eventually
get duplicate frame numbers in ~/NoBackup/bball (which is what I
usually name the directory where I'm processing those files, unless I
have multiple games in one day in which case I use bball, bball1,
etc). That will yield...surprising results.
As for tags and that kind of metadata, that's what I use kpa for. I
use darktable to process images, not manage them.
>> Way 3: best of both worlds by fixing broken assumptions
>>
>> Compatible with moving between computers and mount points, allow big
>> collections (tags, etc) that need quick query capabilities.
>>
>> That reference problem is not specific to darktable. Music library
>> managers, git, git-annex, virtualbox, vmware, docker and the like
>> solved it by storing all information related to a
>> collection/VM/container *at the root* of the collection, with a unique
>> ID, independent on host system, mount point and other factors.
>>
>> In darktable context that would mean store per-photo information not
>> in user home dir but in a per-collection database at the root of the
>> collection, storing only relative paths in the database.
>>
>> That requires the user once to point at a folder and tell darktable
>> "there is a collection that has this folder as root".
>>
>> You can then open your collections on any machine with any mount
>> point, no more duplication, no skulls, no lost work.
>>
>> Yet the potentially huge collection has its per-photo library. You
>> still can query your photos for tags, etc, very quickly.
>>
>>
>> What do you think?
--
Robert Krawitz <r...@alum.mit.edu>
*** MIT Engineers A Proud Tradition http://mitathletics.com ***
Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- http://ProgFree.org
Project lead for Gutenprint -- http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net
"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton
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