Comment 14 for bug 975636

I can confirm this is affecting me on 12.10 as well. I have edited my XDG_PICTURES_DIR (.config/user-dirs.dir) to use a different folder: ~/My Media/Pictures. I was using F-Spot before but choose not to run the auto import as over time I had accidentally ended up with two Photo folders on my system. So I merged them into one under $XDG_PICTURES_DIR/Photos. I started F-Spot. Changed the library folder to ~/My Media/Pictures/Photos and Shotwell correctly imported everything. Restarting Shotwell I found the folder had been set back to the XDG_PICTURES_DIR path. If I change the folder then import an image it would still import to $XDG_PICTURES_DIR/[date-path]/image.jpg

I tried changing my XDG_PICTURES_DIR path to point to the Photos directory instead but this caused Shotwell to not copy photos into the library directory at all (despite explicitly choosing the "Copy photos" button). Changing the XDG_PICTURES_DIR path back to what I had before does not fix this. It seemed Shotwell was now totally confused.

I deleted my Shotwell data directory (.local/share/shotwell), set XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/My Media/Pictures/Photos", started Shotwell, imported a photo and it ended up in $HOME/My Media/Pictures/[date-path]/image.jpg. I was expecting at the very least for it to be the default $HOME/Pictures directory. The behavior makes me think it is hard coded to a folder called "Pictures".

Note that changing XDG_PICTURES_DIR tends to be reflected in Nautilus right away. I don't know if it is cached somewhere though which Shotwell may have read from.