[digiKam-users] Sharing Digikam albums - what are the issues?

[Chris Green]

I have a large[ish] main 'pictures' album on my desktop machine and
use Digikam to manage it.

If I want to duplicate the installation on my laptop what sort of
issues might I run into?

The laptop and the desktop both run xubuntu 18.10 and I will
(probably) run Digikam 5.9 from an Appimage on both.  

As long as I don't run Digikam on both systems at the same time can I
synchronise the two (using rsync or whatever) without problems?  Will
Digikam's databases (I use sqlite) be OK being synchronised like this?

--
Chris Green
·

[woenx]

In theory, yes. I've used the same database in two computers, one with
windows, the other with ubuntu, and it seems to work just fine, although I
have not tried to sincronize both databases with rsync afterwards. Just make
sure you use the same path for you library (it's possible to use two
different paths for one album source, but you have to first edit the
database file).



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

[Remco Viëtor]

On mardi 18 septembre 2018 16:43:01 CEST Chris Green wrote:

> I have a large[ish] main 'pictures' album on my desktop machine and
> use Digikam to manage it.
>
> If I want to duplicate the installation on my laptop what sort of
> issues might I run into?
>
> The laptop and the desktop both run xubuntu 18.10 and I will
> (probably) run Digikam 5.9 from an Appimage on both.
>
> As long as I don't run Digikam on both systems at the same time can I
> synchronise the two (using rsync or whatever) without problems?  Will
> Digikam's databases (I use sqlite) be OK being synchronised like this?

One issue that pops up straight away: if you make changes to both the
databases (laptop and desktop) between syncs, rsync will keep the newest, it
won't do anything to merge changes. So you'd lose all the modifications since
last sync in one of the databases.

That will happen with any program that just copies files w/o knowing anything
about the contents of those files. Even a utility that understands sqlite
databases might not be able to do an unattended merge (in case an item differs,
which one to keep? date/time of last file change isn't enough).

Remco

[Chris Green]

Remco Viëtor <[hidden email]> wrote:

> On mardi 18 septembre 2018 16:43:01 CEST Chris Green wrote:
> > I have a large[ish] main 'pictures' album on my desktop machine and
> > use Digikam to manage it.
> >
> > If I want to duplicate the installation on my laptop what sort of
> > issues might I run into?
> >
> > The laptop and the desktop both run xubuntu 18.10 and I will
> > (probably) run Digikam 5.9 from an Appimage on both.
> >
> > As long as I don't run Digikam on both systems at the same time can I
> > synchronise the two (using rsync or whatever) without problems?  Will
> > Digikam's databases (I use sqlite) be OK being synchronised like this?
>
> One issue that pops up straight away: if you make changes to both the
> databases (laptop and desktop) between syncs, rsync will keep the newest, it
> won't do anything to merge changes. So you'd lose all the modifications since
> last sync in one of the databases.
>

Yes, of course, I realise that.


> That will happen with any program that just copies files w/o knowing anything
> about the contents of those files. Even a utility that understands sqlite
> databases might not be able to do an unattended merge (in case an item differs,
> which one to keep? date/time of last file change isn't enough).
>
I guess this is the *real* problem. If one changes image A on system A
and then iamge B on system B it's (relatively) easy to copy the new
versions from A -> B and B -> A respectively (using --update with
rsync for instance) but with the database you're stuck!  Thanks for
pointing this out.

It thus seems it would make more sense to only copy the image files
and let Digikam update the database, this isn't too difficult.

--
Chris Green
·