I’m considering changing my importing directory structure from year/month/day to only year/month. Would this have any implications on photos already imported? Or are they left where they are, and shotwell continues to look for them in their current location?
If they are left were they are and I decided to move files so all my existing photos are also stored in a year/month directory structure would I need to reimport the files? And if so, would shotwell be able to maintain tags, ratings, and other information?
As far as I remember, it will use the new structure for new imports only.
Since you would be importing from your Library folder, Shotwell will not move around the images.
If you do not have RAW images in your collection, you could try to move them out of the library and reimport them from the outside. In theory the internal hashing should match them up with their old database entries (keeping tags etc), but I’m not 100% confident that this will work properly.
If you have RAW images, I strongly recommend not to do what I described above.
Thanks for the information. I do have RAW images for a good number of folders so this may be more of a headache than it is worth. I was mainly consider it as it would have made an automated flow for importing into an image sharing site a little more straightforward. But that challenge is probably more worthwhile to deal with than issues with the RAW images.