Had to change External Hard Drive; How do I make the change in DigiKam ?

[BuckSkin]

I looked for my answer in the "Handbook" but could not find it.

I have many "collections" in DigiKam that are all on an external hard-drive that has become questionable in it's integrity; thus, I have copied all of my image files to a new drive.

The old drive still remains connected because there are many other things besides pictures stored on it.

How do I disassociate Digikam from the old drive and point DigiKam to the new drive without having to add all of my collections all over again ?

I looked in "settings" for a means to accomplish this, but if the ability is there I could not understand the terminology.

Thanks for reading.

[Michael Eschweiler-2]

High BuckSkin,

Which system are you using? If it's Linux, you should disconnect the old
harddisk and use the same mountpoint for the new one. In case you  used
the (semi-)automatic mount, which is provided by many graphical
interfaces like kde, it's more complicated.

Michael

Am 18.04.2017 um 10:03 schrieb BuckSkin:

> I looked for my answer in the "Handbook" but could not find it.
>
> I have many "collections" in DigiKam that are all on an external hard-drive
> that has become questionable in it's integrity; thus, I have copied all of
> my image files to a new drive.
>
> The old drive still remains connected because there are many other things
> besides pictures stored on it.
>
> How do I disassociate Digikam from the old drive and point DigiKam to the
> new drive without having to add all of my collections all over again ?
>
> I looked in "settings" for a means to accomplish this, but if the ability is
> there I could not understand the terminology.
>
> Thanks for reading.
>
>
>
> --
> View this message in context: http://digikam.1695700.n4.nabble.com/Had-to-change-External-Hard-Drive-How-do-I-make-the-change-in-DigiKam-tp4695800.html
> Sent from the digikam-users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>

[BuckSkin]

Thanks.

I am using 64-bit Windows 7 Pro and digiKam 5.6.0

I went into Disk Management and put the old drive's letter on the new drive, but that did not fool digiKam; it just recognized the old drive with the new letter that I assigned to it.

On Wed, Apr 19, 2017 at 6:55 AM, Michael Eschweiler-2 [via digiKam] <[hidden email]> wrote:

High BuckSkin,

Which system are you using? If it's Linux, you should disconnect the old
harddisk and use the same mountpoint for the new one. In case you  used
the (semi-)automatic mount, which is provided by many graphical
interfaces like kde, it's more complicated.

Michael

Am 18.04.2017 um 10:03 schrieb BuckSkin:

> I looked for my answer in the "Handbook" but could not find it.
>
> I have many "collections" in DigiKam that are all on an external hard-drive
> that has become questionable in it's integrity; thus, I have copied all of
> my image files to a new drive.
>
> The old drive still remains connected because there are many other things
> besides pictures stored on it.
>
> How do I disassociate Digikam from the old drive and point DigiKam to the
> new drive without having to add all of my collections all over again ?
>
> I looked in "settings" for a means to accomplish this, but if the ability is
> there I could not understand the terminology.
>
> Thanks for reading.
>
>
>
> --
> View this message in context: http://digikam.1695700.n4.nabble.com/Had-to-change-External-Hard-Drive-How-do-I-make-the-change-in-DigiKam-tp4695800.html
> Sent from the digikam-users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>

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[Michael Eschweiler-2]

 

Hi,

 

I am using 64-bit Windows 7 Pro and digiKam 5.6.0

Oh, sorry. I said Good bye to Windows 15 years ago and therefore I have no idea about how Windows establishes the link between a device and the mount point eg. drive letter. On Linux you can do this manually in a nice and easy way ...

 

I went into Disk Management and put the old drive's letter on the new drive, but that did not fool digiKam; it just recognized the old drive with the new letter that I assigned to it.

Perhaps disconnecting the old hard disk and than starting digikam with the new disk at the old drive letter digikam tries to connect to the new one...

 

Michael

 

On Wed, Apr 19, 2017 at 6:55 AM, Michael Eschweiler-2 [via digiKam] <[hidden email]> wrote:

High BuckSkin,

Which system are you using? If it's Linux, you should disconnect the old
harddisk and use the same mountpoint for the new one. In case you  used
the (semi-)automatic mount, which is provided by many graphical
interfaces like kde, it's more complicated.

Michael

Am 18.04.2017 um 10:03 schrieb BuckSkin:

> I looked for my answer in the "Handbook" but could not find it.
>
> I have many "collections" in DigiKam that are all on an external hard-drive
> that has become questionable in it's integrity; thus, I have copied all of
> my image files to a new drive.
>
> The old drive still remains connected because there are many other things
> besides pictures stored on it.
>
> How do I disassociate Digikam from the old drive and point DigiKam to the
> new drive without having to add all of my collections all over again ?
>
> I looked in "settings" for a means to accomplish this, but if the ability is
> there I could not understand the terminology.
>
> Thanks for reading.
>
>
>
> --
> View this message in context: http://digikam.1695700.n4.nabble.com/Had-to-change-External-Hard-Drive-How-do-I-make-the-change-in-DigiKam-tp4695800.html
> Sent from the digikam-users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>

 

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View this message in context: Re: Had to change External Hard Drive; How do I make the change in DigiKam ?
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[Markqz]

I'm following this discussion because I'm trying to decide to commit to DK
or to some commercial solution.

On windows, one thing you might try is to rename the new drive to the same
name as the original (which you will have to rename to something else). In
file explorer you just right click on the drive and select rename. But
this won't work if DK is using an internal node number or something.

There might be another approach. I see there is a maintenance procedure DK
that will let you write meta file to sidecar files. I wonder if (assuming
your drive can survive) it would be possible to write all your data to
sidecars and then save the sidecars into the corresponding directories on
the new drive. (freecommander has a good sync tool). Then run the opposite
procedure on the new drive collection to restore the metadata.

The information about maintenance and sidecars is about 3/4 of the way
down this page:

https://docs.kde.org/trunk5/en/extragear-graphics/digikam/using-setup.html#using-setup-metadata

The word "sidecar" doesn't appear in the text – only in the screen
captures so you have to read down the page rather than search for the
term.

Good luck – will be interested if you find a solution.

Mark

On Tue, April 18, 2017 12:03 pm, BuckSkin wrote:
> I looked for my answer in the "Handbook" but could not find it.
>
>
> I have many "collections" in DigiKam that are all on an external
> hard-drive that has become questionable in it's integrity; thus, I have
> copied all of my image files to a new drive.
>
> The old drive still remains connected because there are many other things
>  besides pictures stored on it.

[Mica Semrick]

Have you tried adding the new location as a new collection?

-m

On April 19, 2017 4:05:09 PM PDT, Mark <[hidden email]> wrote:

I'm following this discussion because I'm trying to decide to commit to DK
or to some commercial solution.

On windows, one thing you might try is to rename the new drive to the same
name as the original (which you will have to rename to something else). In
file explorer you just right click on the drive and select rename. But
this won't work if DK is using an internal node number or something.

There might be another approach. I see there is a maintenance procedure DK
that will let you write meta file to sidecar files. I wonder if (assuming
your drive can survive) it would be possible to write all your data to
sidecars and then save the sidecars into the corresponding directories on
the new drive. (freecommander has a good sync tool). Then run the opposite
procedure on the new drive collection to restore the metadata.

The information about maintenance and sidecars is about 3/4 of the way
down this page:

https://docs.kde.org/trunk5/en/extragear-graphics/digikam/using-setup.html#using-setup-metadata

The word "sidecar" doesn't appear in the text – only in the screen
captures so you have to read down the page rather than search for the
term.

Good luck – will be interested if you find a solution.

Mark

On Tue, April 18, 2017 12:03 pm, BuckSkin wrote:
 I looked for my answer in the "Handbook" but could not find it.


 I have many "collections" in DigiKam that are all on an external
 hard-drive that has become questionable in it's integrity; thus, I have
 copied all of my image files to a new drive.

 The old drive still remains connected because there are many other things
  besides pictures stored on it.

[Graham Lambert]

Having looked at the database on Windows (the Windows 10 PC is from my OH) and I think it should be a simple replace disk operation:

Copy all the data from your old drive where digikam is mounted eg. M:.

Rename the old drive to something else. e.g. M: becomes N:

Name the new drive as M:

As far as I can see the Windows version of digikam does not seem to use drive specific identification, but does identify the drive number.

BUT:

If the above does not work then you are in for a bit of a puzzle, to get this absolutely solved. Meaning that what I've read in the Windows database DOES mark the disk specifically and you need to play games with the database.

On Linux the disk IDs are used and any disks you swap have to be re-identified. It may be that you can swap Linux disks as well, but as you have said there is no documentation covering this . If you have collections with loads of tags and references it would be a pity to lose this on a disk swap-out.

I find this the weakest point of digikam and have resorted to using SQL to deal with this in the past.

As a guide if the above does not work you will have to:

• make a copy of the current database (digikam4.db in the base directory of your photo library).
• make a new virgin version of digikam on the new disk - do not add anything except for setting the base directory for your library on the new disk
• if you cannot make a new version you will have to temporarily remove the current disk
  
• ** dump the AlbumRoots table from the new disk
• ** get the entry for the disk identifier
• ** change the entry in the AlbumRoots that identifies your current disk for the identifier that has been created for the new disk
• delete the new installation of digikam from the new disk
• re-install the current disk if removed
  
• copy your library to the new disk
• restart digikam

It should pick up the new location

** What you need to have if you have to follow the above is to be comfortable with the command line and SQL. You will need more than an hour to do this at a comfortable pace.

I have done this a few times successfully. I took this action because as you say there is no documentation and although I do not mind rebuilding my library I do not want to have to rebuild all my tags. I use Linux and Mac, and have migrated the database to MySQL, mainly because I wanted to use other tools to access the database but that's another story.

Hope the simple solution works ;-)

Good luck

Graham

On 19/04/2017 17:56, BuckSkin wrote:

Thanks.

I am using 64-bit Windows 7 Pro and digiKam 5.6.0

I went into Disk Management and put the old drive's letter on the new drive, but that did not fool digiKam; it just recognized the old drive with the new letter that I assigned to it.

On Wed, Apr 19, 2017 at 6:55 AM, Michael Eschweiler-2 [via digiKam] <[hidden email]> wrote:

High BuckSkin,

Which system are you using? If it's Linux, you should disconnect the old
harddisk and use the same mountpoint for the new one. In case you  used
the (semi-)automatic mount, which is provided by many graphical
interfaces like kde, it's more complicated.

Michael

Am 18.04.2017 um 10:03 schrieb BuckSkin:

> I looked for my answer in the "Handbook" but could not find it.
>
> I have many "collections" in DigiKam that are all on an external hard-drive
> that has become questionable in it's integrity; thus, I have copied all of
> my image files to a new drive.
>
> The old drive still remains connected because there are many other things
> besides pictures stored on it.
>
> How do I disassociate Digikam from the old drive and point DigiKam to the
> new drive without having to add all of my collections all over again ?
>
> I looked in "settings" for a means to accomplish this, but if the ability is
> there I could not understand the terminology.
>
> Thanks for reading.
>
>
>
> --
> View this message in context: http://digikam.1695700.n4.nabble.com/Had-to-change-External-Hard-Drive-How-do-I-make-the-change-in-DigiKam-tp4695800.html
> Sent from the digikam-users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>

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[BuckSkin]

Markqz wrote

I'm following this discussion because I'm trying to decide to commit to DK
or to some commercial solution.

Thanks for your ideas.
Please don't let my stumbling computer illiteracy prevent you from giving digiKam a try; digiKam is a wonderful program that is just way smarter than I am.

Although I haven't found a simple less time consuming solution to the disk change, just manually deleting the old collections and relisting them again from the new drive has proven to be the safest/simplest method of migration for me.

The main thing I like about digiKam is how it writes such things as tags and geolocation data right into the jpegs metadata where it is immediately identifiable by any other program without cluttering my folders with extraneous "sidecar" files.

[BuckSkin]

Mica Semrick wrote

Have you tried adding the new location as a new collection?

Not yet and thanks for the idea; this would probably be just the ticket if I was smart enough to figure out how to filter out the sub-folders that I do not want included.

[BuckSkin]

Graham Lambert wrote

If the above does not work then you are in for a bit of a puzzle, to get
this absolutely solved. Meaning that what I've read in the Windows
database DOES mark the disk specifically and you need to play games with
the database.


I find this the weakest point of digikam and have resorted to using SQL
to deal with this in the past.


Good luck

Graham

Thanks for the explanation and ideas.
I wish I were more proficient and familiar with all of these manipulations; but then, persuing such endeavors is how I will learn.