Just found out about this app and it looks interesting! One thing I noticed is I have my photos on a read only drive and PhotoStructure wanted it to be writable.
This is easy to set up:
On your settings’ Your PhotoStructure library section, point to a directory on a separate read-write volume (either local disk or remotely-mounted file share).
In the Where else are your photos and videos? section, point to your read-only only volume with your photos. (You can search the documentation for “scan paths” more more details).
I’m not sure what it would need to write to when scanning my images but if it’s possible It would be nice to keep any of the apps data out of my photo data.
It will also try to write to sidecars next to all your image variations when you edit assets within PhotoStructure’s UI (so when you rotate an image, for example, it will add or edit a .XMP sidecar with a new orientation value.)
If PhotoStructure can’t write the sidecar, it just logs the error and continues: it should be totally fine with read-only scan path volumes.
Thanks, I dont think I saw this on the initial setup screen (i could have missed it) - I added the RO volume now after but it doesn’t seem to be scanning it. Is there a way to see logs of what it’s attempting to do or if it’s getting an error?
PhotoStructure’s logging is pretty quiet by default, but you can set the environment variable PS_LOG_LEVEL=info (or even debug) and then use logtail to watch them go by.
Got it - I’m on MacOS and it was a permissions issue - the app needed permission to read a network volume - when I started it up via the cli it did prompt me - but in the app it did not.
Oof, sorry about that. macOS read permissions are a bear to get right. I’ll poke at that a bit more today and see if I can make that more reliable from my end.
Fresh install on debian and I tried binding my pictures folder read-only but it won’t scan. My library folder is read+write. The log shows db errors. If I remove readonly on the pictures folder it works. It appears to create a file .uuid in my pictures folder. Is there any way around this? I really hate anything touching the media folders?
PhotoStructure should be absolutely fine with read-only volumes. This page explains what’s going on with that file, and how to disable the automatic writing of the .uuid:
Also: if you DM me debug logs of your sync process, I may be able to discern what’s amiss.
So even creating the .uuid files myself I would still get db errors in my initial sync log. I don’t know why but the issue was somehow related to the db force replica setting default. I had not set it and it was creating a replica, but every time I started the sync log would just be db errors. My temp and library folder were both on ssd. I set this setting to false and everything works. I can create the .uuid by hand and keep read only. Thanks
Sorry about the glitches with db replicas! I’ve rewritten much of that code in the v2023.9 builds (including adding a much more robust heuristic for picking the “correct” value for that setting by default), and added (almost total) test coverage for that module.
I suspect if you pull in prealpha, things will be smoother.
Note that I will be promoting prealpha to alpha (and then beta and then stable) as soon as I can.
