Can't open my old collections sensibly.

[aes]

Setup (please complete the following information):

• Distribution: Debian
• Distribution release: trixie/sid
• Geeqie version [geeqie --version]: Geeqie 2.2 GTK3

Describe the bug
Geeqie no longer opens .gqv files. There's a menu item, "File>Open collection...", but it doesn't open .gqv files outside of some directory it wants to use.

To reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior:
Open geeqie. Try to open any of a decade's worth of curated collections.

Expected behavior
Collection opened, pictures browsed.

Additional context
If this turns out to be user error, that'd be good, right?

Cheers.

[caclark]

Before making this change I posted a question on freelists about this - but there was no response.

It seems to me an easier way of handling Collections, because I have a bookmark to the default directory, and in icon view I see the montage thumbnails.

You can open a Collection by navigating to the applicable directory and opening the collection file. Then Back In Folder History will take you back where you were before. That is not so much different to the previous method.

Also if you have a terminal window open geeqie -r <somewhere>/<somename>.gqv will open the Collection.

The Collection will appear in the Open Recent list.

This list is in $HOME/.config/geeqie/history in the [recent] section. If you make a find ~ -name "*.gqv" you can once-only add in all your collections, which will then appear in Open Recent

The maximum length of the list is set in Edit/Preferences/Behavior/Recent Folder Maximum Size

[caclark]

I see a problem in the way Geeqie handles mountable or network drives - and I think it has always been this way.

If a Collection references files that are on a mountable drive that is not mounted when the Collection is opened, Geeqie assumes that the files have been deleted and will remove them from the Collection.

I do not know how to handle this. Maybe look if /mnt/<path> or /media/path or /run/somewhere exists.

Of course, storing the Collection .gqv on the mountable drive avoids the problem.

[tlotze]

There's also the use case of people working on projects that they want to archive, backup, transfer, ... as a whole. For me, this means all sorts of stuff including images and geeqie collections. It's a major nuisance to have files belonging to a project live outside the project directory. Having an option to save a collection either "internally" (i.e. to what now is the standard location) or another path would help hugely, as well as being able to open any gqv file as a collection.

In my case, backup and transfer between machines that use the same folder structure are use cases that even work with the full file paths that are stored in a collection file, so my use cases aren't hypothetical. Thinking about this a bit more, however, one realizes that the combination of collections being stored anywhere on disk in combination with relative paths would be hugely more powerful, enabling people to move their image folders around using any tools while keeping collections intact.

[caclark]

The environment variables XDG_DATA_HOME, XDG_CONFIG_HOME, XDG_CACHE_HOME are used by Geeqie.
https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html
https://www.geeqie.org/help/GuideReferenceConfig.html

You can force Geeqie to store data in non-standard locations by starting Geeqie as:
XDG_DATA_HOME=<path1> XDG_CONFIG_HOME=<path2> geeqie

Paths are stored in Collection files are absolute, not relative.

If you go to Edit/Preferences/File Filters and have a filter with file extension .gqv, and that is set as class Collection, .gqv files will be opened as Collections.

[tlotze]

The environment variables XDG_DATA_HOME, XDG_CONFIG_HOME, XDG_CACHE_HOME are used by Geeqie. https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html https://www.geeqie.org/help/GuideReferenceConfig.html

You can force Geeqie to store data in non-standard locations by starting Geeqie as: XDG_DATA_HOME=<path1> XDG_CONFIG_HOME=<path2> geeqie

That would still give me one single (albeit different than the default) place for all collections during this invocation of geeqie. For the use case I described above, collections should be able to live (including their creation) anywhere in the file hierarchy so they can be stored, e.g., within projects. Also, having to invoke geeqie with custom environment variables per project isn't exactly good usability.

Paths are stored in Collection files are absolute, not relative.

That's clear. Probably I should open a new feature request for being able to store relative paths.

If you go to Edit/Preferences/File Filters and have a filter with file extension .gqv, and that is set as class Collection, .gqv files will be opened as Collections.

Thanks, this helps a lot. For some reason, the class was "keywords and comments" after invoking geeqie 2.2 on a configuration created by 1.4 or something.