Stuck with Shotwell

I am stuck with shotwell.

I started doing photography some years ago and started shooting RAW+JPEG. Since I was using linux, the "default" place to store/sort my photo was shotwell.

I wanted to try other options, I thought it would be easy, since I used to option to write the metadata to the file directly.

Unfortunately 20 000+ pictures tagged and rated, later, I found out there is a bug in shotwell ( https://bugzilla.gnome​.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7​17899 ) where tags are not recorded!

Does anyone have found a migration solution (apart from the time consuming task of re tagging all pictures)?

If you are not afraid of the command line, try Exiftool - you may be able to find a graphical front end interface for it for linux as well:

http://www.sno.phy.que​ensu.ca/~phil/exiftool​/#system

kirk

kirkt wrote in post #17239429
If you are not afraid of the command line, try Exiftool - you may be able to find a graphical front end interface for it for linux as well:

http://www.sno.phy.que​ensu.ca/~phil/exiftool​/#system

kirk

I can use exiftool, but the information I want to input is in a weird database from shotwell.

If I could extract info from that shotwell database in an efficient way I would be golden. Does anyone know how to do it?

wallace1837 wrote in post #17239473
I can use exiftool, but the information I want to input is in a weird database from shotwell.

If I could extract info from that shotwell database in an efficient way I would be golden. Does anyone know how to do it?

What format is the database file in? Could you open it and use SQL to pull the data you need from the tables, and then pipe that into exiftool? using something like Perl to automate it?

Alan

BigAl007 wrote in post #17239661
What format is the database file in? Could you open it and use SQL to pull the data you need from the tables, and then pipe that into exiftool? using something like Perl to automate it?

Alan

They use something called SQLite. I am not versed in database query . Maybe this is a one liner to extract the full path filename and all the tags and rating associated?

Any SQLite expert in the room?

SQLite is your basic open source database management package. It should be avilable on just about all *nix installations. If you do any sort of programming at all it should not be too difficult to find some basic SQL instructional documentation and use it to at least pull out the table structure. Once you have the table structure it should not then be too hard to knock up some queries that will pull the data out of the database. You should then be able to use this extracted data and pass it to Exiftool.

This website is probably built using an SQLite database and PHP, it seems to be the most common solution to dynamic content creation on the web, so basic instruction should not be too hard to find. One other thing, if you have a windows machine with Access then Access can also open SQLite database files, as I have done that with the files from an online ecommerce site that I help manage, just to have a look at the layout of the tables.

Sorry not to be of more help.

Alan

Some water under the bridge...

Now I have extracted the list of files and their rating. I can write the rating to the jpg with exiftool.

Unfortunately, Shotwell does not "refresh" the rating after it is written to the file!

Anyone knows a trick?

wallace1837 wrote in post #17868667
Some water under the bridge...

Now I have extracted the list of files and their rating. I can write the rating to the jpg with exiftool.

Unfortunately, Shotwell does not "refresh" the rating after it is written to the file!

Anyone knows a trick?

I'm not sure I follow your problem. From what you seem to be saying you used Shotwell to add metadata to your images, in the form of a rating. Shotwell recorded this data to its own SQLite database (I think Adobe Lightroom is also based on SQLite), but fails to write it to the actual file. But you have managed to extract the details of the file and the rating from the database by manually querying the table. Having pulled this data from the table you have fed it to Exiftool and updated the actual image file.

Now surely you have no problems, the data is still in the SQLite database that is used by Shotwell, so shotwell can still happily do it's stuff. Your images also have this data stored internally thanks to what you did with Exiftool, so when you try importing the image file into another DAM application the new program will be able to read that data from the file, and incorporate it into whatever system it uses. Why do you need Shotwell to do anything more?

Alan