Shotwell's 'Send To...' feature does not work in MATE without creating 'nautilus-sendto' link

[Nicholas Harvey]

Hi

This problem affects both 19.10 and 20.04.

In Shotwell there is an option to email a selected photo via the default mail client, in my case Evolution. However, in Ubuntu Mate this option is greyed out. You can see this via:

1. Select a photo, and right-click on it. The 'Send To...' option is greyed out.
2. Select a photo, and then click on the 'File' menu. The 'Send To...' option is not greyed out this time, but cannot be selected (so, same result).

A quick online search has found a solution to this, which is:

cd /usr/bin
sudo ln -s caja-sendto nautilus-sendto

Restart Shotwell and the 'Send To...' option now as expected.

Can this solution be validated and if deemed fit for purpose included in the 20.04 LTS?

Thanks
Nick

[Sai Vinoba (saivinob)]

Nick, I cannot reproduce the fault. I'm on 20.04 and Shotwell version is 0.30.7. 'Send To...' option is enabled from both right-click menu as well as File menu and clicking on it opens up my mail client (in my case Geary but when Geary was not set as default, Thunderbird (default) started and asked to create account). See attached. And when I search caja-sendto in /usr/bin, it is NOT a sym link to nautilus-sendto.

[Nicholas Harvey (mobile-harvey)]

Hi Sai

Did you test this on a clean install of Ubuntu Mate? I'm trying to re-test it but my Gnome Boxes VM crashes everytime the welcome screen opens so I'm not able to re-test it right now. IF you are able to verify against a clean installation then that would be useful. Meanwhile I'll let you know if I manage to test it again.

Thanks
Nick

[Sai Vinoba (saivinob)]

Hi, I did clean install of UbuntuMATE 20.04 from 2nd Feb image (took time to sit in front of PC to test and report back :-). I can confirm we have an issue with Shotwell sendto feature, but not exactly the way you had.

For me, on default install, I _had_ 'Send To' option available (not greyed out, either from right-click menu or from File menu). However, initially when I selected the option, I got error message for unable to launch 'Nautilus Send-To'. See attached. I linked caja-sendto to nautilus-sendto and it works OK.

I checked same feature in LinuxMint 19.3 (Cinnamon desktop) and can confirm 'Send To' gives same error as attached. However, unlike in MATE, I could not find a nemo-sendto create link as nautilus-sendto.

Since Shotwell is made for GNOME, this seems to affect all non-GNOME desktops and I'm not expecting Shotwell to fix it. One solution may be to have a post-install script to add link as we manually did.

[Nicholas Harvey (mobile-harvey)]

Nice on Sai - sounds like you have summed it up well there.