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My father has a desktop and a notebook. The desktop is way more powerful and has RAID set up, so he uses it for editing and storing his pictures. But he spends several months a year away from home. So he has a notebook for this. He imports the pictures into shotwell on his computer.

He likes to organise his pictures on the notebook already, by creating and naming the right events, deleting pictures and sometimes editing a bit.

When he is back home, he wants to get his pictures on the desktop, without losing the names of the events in shotwell.

Sadly, one cannot merge two shotwell databases, nor is it possible to import another database.

Do you know any way, I can manage this? Or did I just miss something?

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Maybe not an exact duplicate but your solution is here. –  Tom Brossman Oct 7 '12 at 11:39

1 Answer 1

You may wish to give a chance to a syncing between machines service, such as Ubuntu One (Which comes pre-installed in 12.04 and easy to install in other versions).

This way you can sync your pictures folders from the laptop to your desktop and vice-versa.

Shotwell is going to read the files/folders from the same place in both libraries which allow you to also include Shotwell's information folder/database which is going to be in use for both the desktop and laptop's software. This way, whatever your father do in the laptop when traveling is going to be synced in the desktop and vice-versa. This solution is -however- limited to the available storage in Ubuntu one (starting from 5GB free) of which you can increase by choosing a storage plan (paid) and you may experience an issue or so if you try to make changes simultaneously in both the desktop and laptop, this will force you to use just one Shotwell at once.

There are some other syncing solutions like Dropbox but Ubuntu One provides certain useful services that may adjust what you need.

Good luck!

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Sadly he has bout 100 gigs of pictures by now and it'd be really sad if I had to use a proprietary paid service and a cloud to just copy files from the notebook to desktop –  Meng Tian Apr 23 '13 at 18:46
I think you should include these minor details when asking just to improve your question thus the support you receive. I hope you find a solution and if s please let us know by adding an answer to your own question. Thank you! –  Geppettvs D'Constanzo Apr 24 '13 at 2:05

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