Request recommendations for photo management app. [Solved]

[dunsurfin]

Well, I fired up Picasa and it started going through my HDD looking for photos, which started to appear in the Picasa window, but then Picasa suddenly displayed a message along the lines of "Picasa cannot continue and will close" (I cannot remember the precise words as I am not running SL at the moment) and closed/vanished.

Perhaps it's a bit late to say this but I always stopped Picasa from searching everywhere and specified where to search after it had opened. Did you try running it again after a reboot?

[Fitzcarraldo]

Yes, and it worked... up to a point. It finds all the images on my SL partitions, but the vast bulk of the photos are on my Windows XP partition and, for some reason, Picasa crashes as soon as I try to get it to look there. The WinXP partition (FAT32) is definitely mounted.

[dunsurfin]

Is it mounted with full permissions?

[Fitzcarraldo]

As far as I know. For example I can read and write to the partition from the Terminal and from e.g. Konqueror when logged in under my username or as root (su in Terminal, or kdesu konqueror in Terminal to get root GUI).

Just tried to run it as root from Terminal (sudo picasa) and it starts to populate the window then crashes like it did yesterday. Have not rebooted and retried it this way yet, but will do so.

Do you dual boot, dunsurfin, and does Picasa access your Windows XP partition without any trouble?

[dunsurfin]

Do you dual boot, dunsurfin, and does Picasa access your Windows XP partition without any trouble?

I do dual boot (in fact multiboot - I generally have 2 other distros on, as well as Sabayon and XP, to satisfy the addict in me) but I have never tried to access my XP partitions (3 of those - 2 are NTFS and one small one is FAT32) with my Sabayon Picasa as I keep copies of everything in my /home folder.

2 hours later: I've just tried to access my FAT32 partition with Picasa and it did so without any problem (214 images). Perhaps it may be worth doing it folder by folder rather than asking it to scan the whole XP partition at once.

[Fitzcarraldo]

Thanks for your reply. I'm still getting no joy, and I think that it may be the way the Windows XP partition is mounted, as you suggest.

If I launch Picasa I first opt for the second option Picasa offers me: only scan for pictures in My Documents or whatever. Then I click on File > Add folder to Picasa... and the options presented to me are: Desktop, My Pictures, My Documents, Home and System Root. I then click on the + to expand the System Root directory tree, and all the folders are displayed. My Windows XP partition is the directory /media/ACER/, and the folder I want to get Picasa to search in is /media/ACER/.../My Documents. But if I click on the + sign to expand /media/ then Picasa displays a pop-up window titled Fatal Error saying "Picasa cannot continue" and exits. If instead I just click on the /media/ folder icon and I click on Scan Always then Picasa crashes and I can no longer launch it.

Any ideas?

[dunsurfin]

I've just tried letting Picasa add pictures from my XP my documents folder (NTFS) and it did it without any trouble. My specs are similar to yours, except that I have an AMD Athlon 64X2 4200 and a Nvidia Geforce 7300 on a desktop, so 2 possible causes may be; A fault on the XP partition or a fault in your installation of Picasa (I'm using 3.4E and there might be a difference there). Possible fixes may be to run a thorough check on your XP partition or converting it to NTFS (remembering to alter fstab) or to re-install Picasa.

[Fitzcarraldo]

Just now I launched Picasa and the top-level directory name it displayed for SL was "NTFS"! Bizarre. I assume these problems are due to it being a Windows application running under Wine? Anyway, I re-installed Picasa and now it's back to the behaviour I reported earlier, i.e. still no luck accessing any folders in the Windows XP partition. Perhaps you're right about the NTFS/FAT32 thing, but I don't want to convert the Windows XP partition to NTFS.

I think I'll have to look for a different application. Anyway, thanks for your help, dunsurfin.

EDIT: Just found the following article on photo managers, which is useful. I'll investigate GQview further.

http://www.linux.com/articles/58887?tid ... =39&tid=47

[Fitzcarraldo]

OK, GQview is good: seems to do just what I want. Not sure about editing EXIF data yet, but I can use another application for that if it transpires GQview does not provide that facility.

And it's FOSS, which is nice.

Thanks for everyone's help. I'll mark this thread as "solved".