[digiKam-users] Scan for new items without removing deleted albums

[photo]

Hello,

is there a way to configure Digikam to scan for new items, without removing missing albums or
files?
I'd like to access metadata and thumbnails of photos that have been removed from the filesystem.

when I press F5 new photos in the filesystem are recognized and missing ones are removed from the
view of Digikam.

It seems that Tools > Maintenance > "Scan for new items" doesn't just scan for new items but also
removes deleted items. This was unexpected for me.

My use case is that I'm using a cloud provider to store my photos and synchronize only a subset of
all folders to my local machine. Still I'd like to be able to search through all available photos
and metadata that have been at the local machine at some point.

I tried mounting the cloud drive using webdav, but that's too slow to be usable.

In case someone has another suggestion, some context: I have RAW photos and write the metadata to
XMP sidecars only. Currently there's one local collection with many albums

Best

[woenx]

Mmm, have you tried right-clicking on one album and selecting refresh? New
pictures in that album will be imported, I think. Otherwise it just syncs
digikam with the directory structure and file contents.



--
Sent from: http://digikam.1695700.n4.nabble.com/digikam-users-f1735189.html

[photo]

Thanks, unfortunately refresh of the album also removes photos of that album.

I would also need a way to discover new albums in a collection without removing previously existing albums

October 18, 2019 3:33 PM, "woenx" <[hidden email]> wrote:

> Mmm, have you tried right-clicking on one album and selecting refresh? New
> pictures in that album will be imported, I think. Otherwise it just syncs
> digikam with the directory structure and file contents.
>
> --
> Sent from: http://digikam.1695700.n4.nabble.com/digikam-users-f1735189.html

Le 18/10/2019 à 16:02, [hidden email] a écrit :
> Thanks, unfortunately refresh of the album also removes photos of that album.
>

from your previous post, may be it could be interesting to add a
collection category "cloud"

that allows photos to be on a cloud, that is discuss with the cloud to
have the image list, not directly to the file system.

On my openSUSE Leap 15.1, I have on Dolphin a "share" context menu entry
for digikam folder, so this may be feasible.

With the extension of clouds/fiber links, this option could be very useful

jdd
--
http://dodin.org

[woenx]

The thing is that digikam treats folders as albums.

What if you create a new collection for every group of pictures? And disable
automatic synchronization. And only refresh the collection where you are
working at that moment?



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Sent from: http://digikam.1695700.n4.nabble.com/digikam-users-f1735189.html

[Remco Viëtor]

On vendredi 18 octobre 2019 16:02:03 CEST [hidden email] wrote:
> Thanks, unfortunately refresh of the album also removes photos of that
> album.
>
> I would also need a way to discover new albums in a collection without
> removing previously existing albums
> October 18, 2019 3:33 PM, "woenx" <[hidden email]> wrote:
> > Mmm, have you tried right-clicking on one album and selecting refresh? New
> > pictures in that album will be imported, I think. Otherwise it just syncs
> > digikam with the directory structure and file contents.

Digikam tries very hard to keep its database in sync with the underlying
filesystem, so it's not too much disturbed by changes to the albums from
outside Digikam. That means: adding new images to the database, but also
removing from the database pictures that are removed from the underlying
directories.

What you want seems to go against that principle...


What might work is declaring the cloud collection as a removable collection.
Afaik that allows you to use the database to search that collection even when
it's not available, as database and thumbnails are stored on your local
machine.

You then copy images you need to work on to a local non-removable collection.
Copy to avoid removing them from the database for the removable collection.

This will only work if you are the only user that can modify the image
collection on the cloud, and you manage all the copying through Digikam: in
that case, you can disable the "check for new images on startup", avoiding a
full scan of the cloud collection. If images can be added from outside
Digikam, you may have problems, though... (new images not showing up).

If you indeed need to know which images have been passed through your local
machine, you could use a tag or colour label.

Note that *creating* the database for the cloud collection can take a very
long time. As long as you manage to do all the copying between cloud and local
storage through digikam, subsequent operations should be much faster (but
inherently slow, as there's network transport involved).