Comment 9 for bug 648424

I think there's any number of ways we can go about doing this. Michael's ideas are great, but they involve a broader idea of exporting photos -- being able to customize names and ordering and numbering, almost like generating a report. That's a scheme far larger than this ticket.

The problem here is when you export two photos with the same filename, the second one clobbers the first. That's obviously not right. What if we did something super-simple: When going to export the file, if the filename exists, append an underscore and a numeral and see if that file exists. If so, keep appending numbers until one is found.

With this scheme you would get files like this:

IMG_0123.JPG
IMG_0123_1.JPG

Not as powerful as Michael's idea, but it will work, and preserves the original filename (which is sometimes human-readable).

As it turns out, we have code in Shotwell that does exactly this (we use it for import). In file_util.vala is a function generate_unique_file(). The function returns a File object with a unique name (using the original if possible).

This, I think, is the easiest way to go to solve this ticket. Michael, I think your ideas are interesting, as always. If you'd like to propose a new feature, I encourage you to file a ticket fleshing this out on our Trac server: http://trac.yorba.org.

-- Jim