[digiKam-users] Should it not be simple to move entire collection of photos to a new location?

[BensonBear]

I need to be able to move the digikam database from one machine to another
and back again.   This is for taking a collection on the road without
internet access, and then putting it back on a desktop machine, and has to
be done frequently.

All the photos are on both machines, and that is managed independently.
They are all in one collection stored in one directory, with subdirectories
being albums in the collection.
 
All I need to do is copy the database over to the second machine, alter it
to point to the photos on that machine, and then after using that machine,
copy the database back and alter it to point to the photos on the first
machine.

As far as I understand it, it should suffice to change "identifier" and
"specificPath" in the table AlbumRoots.   But when I do this, digikam
insists on processing each file of 30,000 all over again and this takes a
long while.  Should not this move be *transparent* to digikam?   How can I
make it transparent, or, if it should be already, what else might I be doing
wrong?   I believe I changed the albumRoots to the correct values since it
does not change them itself.

The main thing I am seeing in the console messages is this, one for each
file:


Is there somewhere else some information is stored in the database that also
has to be changed?  I have looked closely at the schema and cannot see any
likely candidate.

I don't want to alter things with point and click in the UI, I want to be
able to have one command that I can automate with a simple bash script.
Surely this should be easy?




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Le 29/09/2019 à 12:57, BensonBear a écrit :
> I need to be able to move the digikam database from one machine to another
> and back again.

why not use an usb3 external disk?

jdd

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http://dodin.org

[BensonBear]

[hidden email] wrote
> Le 29/09/2019 à 12:57, BensonBear a écrit :
> why not use an usb3 external disk?

The point I was asking about was the database file itself.  On different
machines (especially if on different operating systems) the collections will
likely have to be stored in different locations (that is, in terms of the
device id and pathname) so the databases themselves have to be different.
From what I gathered it should suffice to change the AlbumRoots rows for
those collections to point to the correct spot, but when I did this, I found
that although it worked, it took a long time to start up digikam and it
seemed to be doing unnecessary work.

It turns out that the reason for this was that when the image files
themselves were copied, the technique I used dropped some of the detail in
the "time modified" data for the image files and thus digikam had to
re-process them.    This problem is a problem that is external to digikam,
whereas the problem I was asking about (in digikam forum!) is within digikam
itself (and easily solved as it turns out by what I was doing).



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