digiKam in a dual-boot system?

[Carsten Fuchs]

Dear digiKam group,

I'm new to digiKam, and first of all let me say that I find it
*awesome*! I love it very much and it is a huge joy to use it both under
Windows and under Linux!

That already brings me to my question:
Having installed digiKam 5.1 on a dual-boot machine with Windows 10 and
Ubuntu 16.04, I'd like to share albums and databases under both systems.

I've not yet tried this, because I don't want to mess up my fresh
installations and database, but obviously under Windows we have
different paths to the database files and albums than under Ubuntu.
Checked the docs, FAQs and mailing list archives, and found loosely
related, but no applicable solutions.

What is a good way to approach this?

Any hint would very much be appreciated.
Many thanks and best regards,
Carsten

[Christoph Huckle]

Hi Carsten,

I consider myself also still not a pro, but checked out this already a bit.

The biggest question there is where do you store your pictures? NAS? Separate partition?

There is no feature for this, but you can add multiple paths in the Digikam Database manually and then it (somehow) finds the correct one.

Cheers

Christoph

Carsten Fuchs <[hidden email]> schrieb am Fr., 19. Aug. 2016 um 09:07 Uhr:

Dear digiKam group,

I'm new to digiKam, and first of all let me say that I find it
*awesome*! I love it very much and it is a huge joy to use it both under
Windows and under Linux!

That already brings me to my question:
Having installed digiKam 5.1 on a dual-boot machine with Windows 10 and
Ubuntu 16.04, I'd like to share albums and databases under both systems.

I've not yet tried this, because I don't want to mess up my fresh
installations and database, but obviously under Windows we have
different paths to the database files and albums than under Ubuntu.
Checked the docs, FAQs and mailing list archives, and found loosely
related, but no applicable solutions.

What is a good way to approach this?

Any hint would very much be appreciated.
Many thanks and best regards,
Carsten

[Carsten Fuchs]

Hi Christoph,

I too checked this out a bit more, and I think that the problem can be generalized as
follows:

        "The file system paths of the digiKam database files and the album roots occasionally
change (optionally with the relative path from the database files to the album roots not
changing). How can this be addressed?"

Examples include dual-boot systems, multiple installations (e.g. copying a backup to a
different computer that is used only for viewing the albums) or simply moving the album
root directories in the file system.

I found that with digiKam 5.1, file ~/.config/digikamrc has the paths to the database
files: Setting the paths appropriately solves the half of the problem with moved
database file locations.

Am 19.08.2016 um 16:55 schrieb Christoph Huckle:
> The biggest question there is where do you store your pictures? NAS? Separate partition?

That's a good one. I have not yet tried this out, but maybe the second half of the
problem is fixed if the album roots are on an USB or NAS drive -- anything that keeps
the album paths or UUIDs constant.

As I use different harddisks (e.g. in the backup "view only" system) on different
platforms (Windows, Linux), file system paths to the same album roots are often
different. (Maybe there is a clever trick with symlinks or file:// URI schemes, but I'm
not aware of any.)

> There is no feature for this, but you can add multiple paths in the Digikam Database
> manually and then it (somehow) finds the correct one.

Yes, that sounds promising – but digiKam identifies albums by their ID in table
"AlbumRoots", doesn't it? The ID at least (along with the custom "identifier") would be
unique, even if "label" and "specific path" were kept the same.

I wonder if there is indeed a mechanism that identifies multiple entries in table
AlbumRoots as referring to the same album?

Best regards,
Carsten

[Christoph Huckle]

Hi Carsten,

I'm having at the moment (want to transition to MySQL) two databases, one on a Linux machine and one on a Mac.

I keep them up to date by copying, not very efficient that's why I want to go to MySQL. The Albums are on a server and are then mounted in different ways on both machines. I modified the entries in the "AlbumRoots" as follows:

networkshareid:?mountpath=/home/christoph/Photos/2014&&mountpath=/Volumes/Photos/2014

The first part "mountpath=/home/christoph/Photos/2014" is the linux path, the other one for the Mac.

Both PCs find the pictures without issues.

Best regards,

Christoph

Carsten Fuchs <[hidden email]> schrieb am So., 21. Aug. 2016 um 12:08 Uhr:

Hi Christoph,

I too checked this out a bit more, and I think that the problem can be generalized as
follows:

        "The file system paths of the digiKam database files and the album roots occasionally
change (optionally with the relative path from the database files to the album roots not
changing). How can this be addressed?"

Examples include dual-boot systems, multiple installations (e.g. copying a backup to a
different computer that is used only for viewing the albums) or simply moving the album
root directories in the file system.

I found that with digiKam 5.1, file ~/.config/digikamrc has the paths to the database
files: Setting the paths appropriately solves the half of the problem with moved
database file locations.

Am 19.08.2016 um 16:55 schrieb Christoph Huckle:
> The biggest question there is where do you store your pictures? NAS? Separate partition?

That's a good one. I have not yet tried this out, but maybe the second half of the
problem is fixed if the album roots are on an USB or NAS drive -- anything that keeps
the album paths or UUIDs constant.

As I use different harddisks (e.g. in the backup "view only" system) on different
platforms (Windows, Linux), file system paths to the same album roots are often
different. (Maybe there is a clever trick with symlinks or file:// URI schemes, but I'm
not aware of any.)

> There is no feature for this, but you can add multiple paths in the Digikam Database
> manually and then it (somehow) finds the correct one.

Yes, that sounds promising – but digiKam identifies albums by their ID in table
"AlbumRoots", doesn't it? The ID at least (along with the custom "identifier") would be
unique, even if "label" and "specific path" were kept the same.

I wonder if there is indeed a mechanism that identifies multiple entries in table
AlbumRoots as referring to the same album?

Best regards,
Carsten

[Carsten Fuchs]

Hi Christoph,

Am 2016-08-21 um 12:17 schrieb Christoph Huckle:
> The Albums are on a server and are then mounted in
> different ways on both machines. I modified the entries in the
> "AlbumRoots" as follows:
>
> networkshareid:?mountpath=/home/christoph/Photos/2014&&mountpath=/Volumes/Photos/2014

Thanks, that's looking very interesting!
Do you know if it is digiKam itself that deals with the "&&" (or "&"?),
or is it anything else, e.g. in the OS's network code?
If it was digiKam, the same approach might work with AlbumRoots such as

volumeid:?path=/home/carsten/images&path=e:/some-win-drive/images

(I still have to try...)

Based on this, I did some further searching and found this thread:
https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/digikam-users/2014-December/thread.html#20401

The same problem is discussed there, and I very much agree with Andrew
Goodbody's suggestion that AlbumRoots should be kept in the digikamrc file.

Will further check this out and post updates here.  :)

Best regards,
Carsten

[Carsten Fuchs]

Hi,

Am 22.08.2016 um 11:11 schrieb Carsten Fuchs:
> If it was digiKam, the same approach might work with AlbumRoots such as
>
> volumeid:?path=/home/carsten/images&path=e:/some-win-drive/images

Ok, while I had no success with volumeid and paths in any combinations, using this:


identifier:
networkshareid:?mountpath=e:/ArchivCF&mountpath=/media/carsten/Familienarchiv/ArchivCF

specificPath:
/


works for me very well, both under Windows and Linux.
*Not* working was moving "ArchivCF" to the specificPath:


identifier:
networkshareid:?mountpath=e:&mountpath=/media/carsten/Familienarchiv

specificPath:
/ArchivCF


Still untested is using more than two mountpaths, but I guess that expanding this is
straightforward.

Now, the only problem left is that whenever I switch between Windows and Linux, a dialog
about a change in the locale (Windows: "System", Linux: "utf-8") appears as described at
   - https://www.digikam.org/node/195
   - https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/digikam-users/2012-July/016522.html
This seems not to be a big issue, digiKam seems to work well when the change is
confirmed (I didn't try yet e.g. using tags with special characters though).

Best regards,
Carsten