Digikam, F-Spot, whatever - sharing photos and tags between accounts/machines?

[Marcin Kasperski]

>> Is any of photo management apps able to handle... a few users (a few
>> accounts on the same machine, maybe also a few machines with NFS or
>> samba mounted directories) share the same photo set, tag/label it
>> cooperatively etc... I do not mean any "huge" case. Just a scenario
>> where everybody in the family has own account on Linux desktop, and
>> sometimes also logs from laptop...
>
> Marcin, and list,
>
> did you find any solution to this problem? I, too, am very interested
> in the same scenario.

As far as I am considered, nothing perfect. Some possibilities:

- use flickr, smugmug, 23hq, picasa or some other internet
  photo-sharing service (preferably one with f-spot upload plugin)

  { Personally I like those to put some photos and send link
    to viewers, but managing all my photos is different story }

- put photos on shared storage, mount it under the same path everywhere,
  also symlink ~/.gnome2/f-spot/photos.db to file placed on shared storage
  (similar trick may work for digikam)

  { Not tried, don't know whether sqlite works over nfs, beware of
    conflicts, should work if just many accounts on one machine are to
    share the data }

- have separate copy of photos on every machine, sync them using rsync
  or unison, sync also .db file

  { Works, but if you happen to change .db on both ends, merging won't
    be easy, having separate copy of photos is a kind of backup }

- have separate copy of photos on every machine and sync them using rsync
  or unison, work in "save metadata to the file" mode, have separate
  .db file on every machine 

  { If using f-spot, require reimporting. May be better with digikam
    which autodetects new images }



-- 
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| Marcin Kasperski   |  For waterfall, milestones are commitments.
| http://mekk.waw.pl | For iterative development, they are decision
|                    |               points. (Martin)
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