I asked a similar question back in October but I think i have a better idea of how Photostructure works now and want/need some additional clarification.
I have about 50,000 assets organized in a hierarchical folder structure…from when I was more diligent with photo organization and when I was the only person taking pictures. Now I have a variety of drives, cloud services and cameras with clutter and multiple duplicates. I would like to use Photostructure to deduplicate all of this clutter and (potentially) manually move the deduplicated stuff into appropriate folders in the legacy structure. (This folder structure is also the basic for an autogenerated web gallery using Single File Photo Gallery)
I have started Photostructure importing my legacy folder structure using the “no thanks. I like my photos and videos where they are”. Am I right in understands that if I now add other folders to the scan list (“Where else are your photos and videos”) and switch to automatic organization (“Yes, please copy my photo and videos into the Photostructure Library”), only 'new" photos will be copied/organized and my legacy folders will not be copied over to the Photostructure folder/library?
So you’re trying to achieve a different behavior for different scan folders. That’s not a documented feature that I am aware of (frankly, I would consider it a bug if you’re right), so even if it does work the way you assume, I would not count on that surviving any number of events (such as a library rebuild) or future releases.
@avdp is correct: the setting you edit in the “May PhotoStructure organize your photos and videos?” section, which is called copyAssetsToLibrary, is global (as are all settings at this point!)
There was discussion of supporting setting “overlays” per directory (by looking for a .photostructure-settings.toml files in current and parent directories), but I’m a bit leery to that solution (it felt like too much rope), but that would solve this issue.
Note that you can use environment variables to override any setting, and run sync manually for a given directory. You could cook up a quick script that goes through each directory, with different settings:
#!/bin/sh
export PATH="/path/to/photostructure-for-servers:$PATH"
# Files found in these paths are copied into the library:
export PS_COPY_ASSETS_TO_LIBRARY=true
photostructure sync /first/path /second/path
# Files in these paths WON'T be copied into the library
# (if a copy is already in the library path, they won't be deleted)
export PS_COPY_ASSETS_TO_LIBRARY=false
photostructure sync /third/path
