Ubuntu – How to troubleshoot photo import failure with Shotwell

I recently did this with a large photo collection, and I recommend you stay with Shotwell for this. You have to use a few tricks to get what you want though.

First, make sure you set 'Write tags, titles and other metadata to photo files' in Shotwell, like in @Paradiesstaub's comment.

If the folder names are to be used for tagging, say like 'New Year's Eve', then import folders individually and tag that batch, they'll be listed as 'Last Import' at the top left of the Shotwell window.

Once you get all your folders imported, tag everyone. Once you have everything tagged, it's already written to the individual files. You can move them around and the tags stay.

At this point, you can leave the files in the original folders, or have Shotwell organise them. I chose to have Shotwell organise them by Year and Month sub-folders. To do this, I selected all the files, and exported them from Shotwell to a backup drive. Then, I deleted everything from Shotwell, and re-imported from the backup drive. Now I just import and tag new ones as I go, and Shotwell watches the directory and keeps it organised.

Sort of spamish, but I found myself with the same problem a few monts ago, and I wrote a small utility that does just that:

https://github.com/jesjimher/imgdupes

It's a python script that scans a directory tree looking for duplicates. Its syntax is intentionally similar to fdupes, with the difference that imgdupes ignores all metadata and analyzes only the image data chunk of a JPEG file. This means that two different versions of the same image, with different tags, rotation flags, dates, etc., will be reported as duplicates even if physical files are different (and thus not detected as duplicates by fdupes/shotwell).

It was recently renamed to jpegdupes, and is now on Pypi repos, so scanning a tree for duplicated images might be done like this:

sudo pip install jpegdupes jpegdupes -d ~/Photos/ (or whatever your path is)

It would look for JPEGs which are actually the same picture (differing only in metadata), and would interactively show differences and ask for which version to keep.

Hope it helps.