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My laptop hard drive is running out of space so I decided to put my entire photo library (33000+ pictures, 160 Gb) on a dedicated external hard drive. The process went smoothly ... until I found out that trying to browse my library without the hard drive connected to my laptop resulted in Shotwell deleting all my pictures from the library (but not from the hard drive) since they are not "physically" accessible. i won't be traveling all the time with my external hard drive so this is pretty annoying ...

Is there any way to circumvent this behavior and be able to browse the Shotwell library using the thumbnails without the external hard drive connected ? Some of my friends within the Windows environnement told me that they can do this with Adobe Lightroom for example.

If there is no way to do so with Shotwell, my move to an external hard drive is pretty useless.

Thanks for your help and tips !

Cowboydan
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  • You could find a solution in the answer to this similar question: http://askubuntu.com/questions/276277/shotwell-storing-part-of-library-on-external-hdd?rq=1 – Simon Nov 03 '16 at 14:03

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One perhaps obvious alternative solution would be to simply move your installation (and your entire photo library) to a larger drive. As the price of internal storage continues to drop this approach becomes more and more attractive.

Step 1) Clone your existing drive to your new drive by using the new drive as a target rather than an image file. Be careful to choose your target correctly sudo fdisk -l can help.

Step 2) Physically install the new drive in your system to replace the old one.

Step 3) Connect your external and copy your photo library back.

Elder Geek
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