So I did a jump from Ubuntu 22.04 to 26.04 (clean install, same home dir since it’s on a different disk) and installed shotwell from the snap packages. Now, I’ve been using shotwell since 2016, and I checked the ~/.local/share/shotwell/data dir on my backup copy as well as on the disk and those were the same before I started the updated shotwell.
However… it is now trying to import the entire ~/Picture directory (which is kind of immense). I would understand scanning it, as it does, to compare the dir contents with the database, but it seems to have NO info.
Does shotwell in the snap package have something else it looks at? I’m pretty sure my old shotwell install on 22.04 (which would have originally been installed on 20.04 and not from snap and migrated there via do-release-upgrade) was not a snap package so maybe there’s some differences here I’m not aware of? Or maybe it’s too soon to try shotwell on 26.04? Or I can somehow go back to an older version of shotwell? I unfortunately did not record the version of shotwell on my 22.04 install since i wasn’t expecting it to go sideways.
Anyway, this reload will take DAYS and i’m not sure it’s going to know what the tags are (I saved them into the images, but I don’t think shotwell pulls tags from images) which is going to be years of work up in smoke.
Anyone know what I might be overlooking? I do have my original untouched backup of my home dir in case the snap install cleared out some files I don’t know about?
Arrrghhh (the 26.04 update wasn’t exactly planned, I was trying to do a do-release-upgrade to 24.04 but something went sideways, even tho I’ve done this upgrade before on other servers)
I don’t know anything about or support the Snap package, sorry. Probably someone thought that was a good idea and forgot to make the database accessible to the snap. I can only refer you to Ubuntu support. Although from the bug reports I’d say Ubuntu should still ship it as a deb? packages.ubuntu.com seems to be down, unfortunately
I thought I would follow up here. I don’t know why but when I googled up installing shotwell (since sometimes the package names change, etc), all the examples were in snap (or flatpak, or installing from source) and since I’d just installed firefox which requires snap nowadays, I figured I’d do shotwell this way too.
So anyway that just did not work: Shotwell came up, was empty, and asked to import the ~/Pictures directory and once I started that, that’s when I realized things were going south and wrote my message above.
So the next day I stopped the import, killed off shotwell and spent some time figuring out how to uninstall but in the end I used sudo snap remove --purge shotwell (the purge option was necessary otherwise it was spinning way too long trying to uninstall). I checked all my files & shotwell config/database, and nothing had been touched at all by the snap shotwell’s efforts at importing, so I have no idea what was going on there. I did try to see if I could use find / -name photo.db to find out where it thought it was writing to but it must have been internal somewhere to the snap install?
Anyway, I went with apt install shotwell this time around and things are running just fine now.
So if anyone else runs into weirdness when trying to migrate an existing shotwell setup into the next distro, maybe this will help
