Shotwell with Dropbox

Question

I import all my photos with Shotwell into a folder within my Dropbox so all the photos are available to other devices. However, most importing is done on Linux laptop and while photos are available on the Linux desktop (a separate machine) the databases seem to be different so I have difficulty locating photos. Can anyone suggest a remedy ?

Supplementary question - if I add tags to the photos on, say the desktop, are these applied on the laptop as well ?

Answer 1

I would suggest two things:

• First - use symlinks to route shotwell into using the pictures directory of the dropbox folder for its photo store.
• second - ensuring you do not have shotwell open at the same time on both machines - although dropbox has conflict resolution, for the shotwell internal db files it will probably only allow you to select one or the other of the versions.

This method should mean the tags will be shared too.

Answer 2

By default, Shotwell stores all metadata only in its database. There's an option in the Preferences to enable writing metadata into files (it's on the first tab in Preferences in Metadata section). This way you get tags in sync.

Edit: Expanding on the Danny's answer, you could also sync Shotwell's database directly if you want to sync everything. This will however work only if your photos are stored in the same location on all computers where you want to sync the database.

This can theoretically lead to database corruption or data loss if you have both Dropbox and Shotwell running on multiple computers (and therefore there's a risk of edit conflicts).

Database is stored in ~/.shotwell/data/photo.db – either symlink it or move it into Dropbox (and then symlink it back) – I will assume you use ~/Dropbox directory.

Run this on your laptop (where the database is most up-to-date):

mv ~/.shotwell/data/photo.db ~/Dropbox/photo.db
ln -s ~/Dropbox/photo.db ~/.shotwell/data/photo.db

Now on your desktop, backup or remove the local database:

mv ~/.shotwell/data/photo.db ~/.shotwell/data/photo.db.original

(or to remove: rm ~/.shotwell/data/photo.db)

And again, symlink the synchronised database from Dropbox to the original location:

ln -s ~/Dropbox/photo.db ~/.shotwell/data/photo.db

Answer 3

A simple one liner zsh command can link all your pictures from Shotwell into your Dropbox account. Try this:

cd Dropbox/Photos/ zsh ; zsh> foreach f in find ~/Pictures/**2013** -name '*.JPG'; do ; echo $f ; ln -fs $f . ; done; zsh> foreach f in find ~/Pictures/**2012** -name '*.JPG'; do ; echo $f ; ln -fs $f . ; done;

The softlinks are created from Shotwell into Dropbox/Photos folder. These files are then synced into your Dropbox account and availabe on multiple computers, without affecting your Shotwell libary. Then you can do the same from the other Linux computer as well.

As long as the image names which are being linked into Dropbox are unique between multiple computers, there should be no problem and all photos will come into Dropbox.