shotwell

jarryson@gmail.com expanded a bit in an email to the Shotwell mailing list:

http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html

instead of put all files into ~/.shotwell, put config files to

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/shotwell, cache files to $XDG_CACHE_HOME/shotwell, data

files to $XDG_DATA_HOME/shotwell will be better.

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME default is ~/.config

$XDG_CACHE_HOME default is ~/.cache

$XDG_DATA_HOME default is ~/.local/share

it will make your $HOME dir clean, and easier for user to delete what the

don't want, e.g. cache files. just delete ~/.cache, no need to find cache

file in every application dirs.

glib2 provide g_get_user_config_dir(), and python provide pyxdg, vala i

don't know yet.

Hi, I have fixed some of this bug, however, I need to know what the nature of the .shotwell/mimics directory is. What is it? What is it used for? etc.

@and471,

that's great that you want to take on this project. Here are a few things you should know:

1. Of course, existing Shotwell users have a library in .shotwell. For existing users, I think we don't want to migrate this library to the XDG directories since it might potentially be on another filesystem: some users may have created a symbolic link from ~/.shotwell to some other drive since Shotwell's thumbnail cache may grow quite large. So I think it's best to leave things in place for existing users.

2. Shotwell has a -d option which the user can specify to point to an alternate data directory. We want to keep this option alive. So with your changes, if I type 'shotwell -d foo' then Shotwell should use an alternate data directory with the same structure that the .shotwell directory has today (i.e. subdirectories data, mimics, thumbs).

3. The XDG directory specification specifies three separate directories for configuration, data and cache. For Shotwell, I think the current directories .shotwell/data and .shotwell/thumbs should move into the XDG data directory, and ./shotwell/mimics should move into the XDG cache directory. You asked about the mimics directory. That's where Shotwell writes JPEG versions of each RAW photo the user imports. Shotwell can regenerate those if they are deleted, so I think they can safely live in the XDG cache directory. Shotwell is not yet smart enough to regenerate its thumbnails automatically if those are deleted, so I think that Shotwell's thumbnails should live in the XDG data directory.

Thanks again for your help with this!

I've just upped this bug's priority to High, but I still think it's unlikely that we at Yorba will be able to fix this for the 0.12 release this spring, unless someone external wants to contribute a patch. We agree this would be a nice change, but we're currently focusing our limited resources on features that are more visible to most users.

We can consider this for 0.13.

Thanks for the patch! Lucas, please review.

Fixed in 7ce2f47eaf2b59b72a74943ea6f425cc1d33290b.