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Steve Brodie
Asked: 2015-04-28 04:00:36 +0800 CST

Shotwell not displaying key images for events?

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I have recently imported my shotwell photo library to a new installation of 15.10 'standard' ubuntu. All seems ok except that it is not displaying the key event images. Even if I set a new key event image, I still just have grey boxes in the event view. Any ideas how to restore these images? Shotwell v 0.22.0

Thanks!

shotwell

1 Answers

  1. If you start shotwell from the terminal, you'll probably see messages like

    Unable to fetch preview for Event ... Failed to open file <file_name>: No such file or directory

    Usually shotwell recreates missing thumbnail files on demand, but this feature seems not to work for key images of events.

    So in principle you should be able to recreate your event preview by opening the event and browsing the preview of all the contained images, which will trigger the thumbnail creation.

    There is another caveat with the thumbnail recreation though: As only needed thumbnails are created, the size you set for the preview images when browsing the event does matter. At first I browsed the images using a small preview size in order to fit as many images as possible on one screen, but this triggered thumbnail creation only for the lowest resolution thumbnails and the event image was still not shown. After setting the preview size to max and browsing the event again the required thumbnail was finally available :-)

    Which thumbnail size you need to generate for your event image is shown in the error message on the terminal as part of the name of the missing file. The path usually contains the folder thumbs360 for high resolution thumbnails or thumbs128 for low resolution thumbnails (I think these two are the only sizes used by shotwell).

    When browsing your event to trigger thumbnail creation do not scroll through your images to fast! shotwell will only work on visible images (so just opening the event or jumping to the last image won't create any thumbnails for the images in between) and it needs some time to process the images (in my version it creates a low resolution thumbnail first and I needed to wait for the preview to improve from scaled low resolution to high resolution thumbnail before scrolling to the next screen).

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