Shotwell accepts f-spot tags with commas ('), but they are separators in Shotwell

[Duncan Lithgow]

Binary package hint: shotwell

This is a bug about the way Shotwell handles importing a batch of photos which have previously been managed by F-spot.

In F-spot there is no problem with having commas in the tag names, so a tag like Surname, Firstname is fine. When this tag is imported into Shotwell it keeps the tag as Surname, Firstname but as soon as you apply it to anything creates two new tags one called Surname and one called Firstname. This quickly starts to make a real mess of my tagging system where I have lots of people in the Surname, Firstname format.

Workarounds:
* I can manually edit all the tags which include commas before I apply them to any pictures. But that assumes I'm aware of the problem in advance.
* I can fix it up afterwards. But I can only remove tags from one picture at a time, tags can't be edited as a batch operation for some reason.

Solutions:
* What about if Shotwell collected all the tags and presented the ones including commas, explained the problem and asked that they be renamed.
* Shotwell could use a different separator.
* Shotwell might be able to encode commas found in imported tags in a way which made them different from the tag separators.

Anyway, I think this is going to be a big headache for people who want to migrate from F-spot to Shotwell if it isn't fixed.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.10
Package: shotwell 0.7.2-0ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.35-20.29-generic 2.6.35.4
Uname: Linux 2.6.35-20-generic i686
Architecture: i386
Date: Tue Sep 14 20:02:32 2010
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" - Beta i386 (20100901.1)
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_DK.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: shotwell

I've now manually upgraded to shotwell 8.1 and the issue is still there, just letting you know. But wow, fast pace of development and good looking application. I genuinely look forward to when I can make the switch.

[Adam Dingle (adam-yorba)]

Duncan,

thanks for the suggestion. I've created a ticket upstream at

http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/2557

I think the easiest solution would be that if Shotwell finds commas in imported tags, it could simply replace them with a different character, e.g. '_'. How does that sound to you?

[Duncan Lithgow (duncan-lithgow)]

Replacing the comma with another character would be the fastest and
easiest fix I guess. It would probably be a bit annoying and would at
least require a message of some sort. For people used to F-stop they
might otherwise assume something went wrong and just add the commas
again. Hmm and Shotwell doesn't stop me adding commas to the tags -
definately some issues there.

[Duncan Lithgow (duncan-lithgow)]

I've thought a bit more about this and I think that commas are such an integral part of english that it will just cause problems if Shotwell continues to use them as separators. In order to have tags listed in a useful alphabetical order using commas is the easiest solution. Some examples:

Places:
* NZ, Auckland
* USA, California, Los Angeles
* USA, Washington

People:
* Smith, Bob
* Smith, Janice

Wildlife:
* Beetles (Coleptera), Takvinger
* Beetles (Coleptera), common dung beetle
* Butterflies (Lepidoptera), Påfulgeøje

And so on. Without the use of commas these entries would be very hard to understand. Who is 'Smith Janice'? where is NZ Auckland and so on.

My initial suggestion is that Shotwell uses a semicolon in place of a comma.

[Adam Dingle (adam-yorba)]

We have a new upstream ticket for this issue:

http://redmine.yorba.org/issues/4950