First of all, thank you for making this great piece of software. It made my switch from windows much easier. This is easily the best photo transfer utility available on Linux.
That being said, there are a few things that could be done better (at least in my opinion) that may not have been considered depending on the way someone uses the software.
In my use case, I frequently need to download pictures from the same source to multiple locations. I always group photos by day and select groups that I need to download to one location, download those while deleting the files from the source, and rinse and repeat.
This is made quite difficult by the fact that all of the pictures are already selected at the start. Clearing this selection can be difficult (at least I had a hard time figuring it out. (it would be a nice option to not have anything selected by default). Microsoft Photo Gallery (which is now discontinued but still the best photo download tool on Windows) has a check box for each group of photos that makes this very easy to do. I would usually select a set of pictures to import and set for automatic deletion after importing, then go back and select the next set to import.
Grouping works by number of hours. It would be much more useful to be able to group by Day, Week or Month …
Check boxes on the thumbnails are a bit buggy. It’s like the clickable area is much smaller than the check box. Also, checking the box requires multiple clicks (it’s not reliable enough to figure out if it’s a double or single click). Unchecking the box seems to be a single click but only in a small area in the corner of the check box.
Those are the issues I encountered while using this software. It’s great otherwise and still the best I was able to find for Linux. I’m running Fedora 32 by the way.
To aid your understanding, it is absolutely vital to distinguish between selecting photos and marking them for download. Only files that are marked for download will be downloaded.
Click on the device or my computer checkmark in the upper left hand corner to mark or unmark all the photos being displayed. It’s a toggle switch.
Use the timeline to group photos chronologically, using day, week, month, or year, then use the device checkmark as above. Quick and simple.
You don’t say which version of the program you are using. You should always use the latest version. Version 0.9.19 and newer fix a bug which makes marking / unmarking files very difficult on recent versions of Qt 5.
I was using 0.9.18. I thought that I was using the latest version because “check for updates” told me so. I’ll update to the latest version.
I understand the difference between the selecting and marking for download, it was just not intuitive especially with check boxes not working properly. I don’t understand why the selecting step is even needed. Wouldn’t it be enough to just select or mark the pictures you want to download?
It would be nice to just be able to mark a group for download.
You can use temporal metadata to automatically create subfolder names that will group photos by time such as day. The idea is to set it up so that the downloading process is largely automatic.
Sorry, but that flies way over my head. I have no idea how I would even start doing that. I don’t see anything within Job Codes that would let me do anything beyond giving it a name that is used to create the folder.
The way I use this application is to download progress photographs into different project folders. I almost always name the photographs “MM-DD-YYYY - Progress Photograph ###”. That is why Job Codes don’t work for my use. Pictures are usually taken on one project per day, so I like to group them by day it makes it easy to select the pictures I need to go to a specific location. The easiest way for me to do that so far was to just select a block of pictures that belong to one project, import and delete them and then repeat that for the next project.
I don’t see a way to automate that with the way RPD is set up now, but it’s still way better than any other option out there. It could be just lack of knowledge on my part. It’s also difficult for developers to think of every possible use case.
That is indeed true. In such circumstances, most people would choose a naming scheme that combines chronological elements with a job code, which is super easy to automate.
The subfolders 2020 and 20200728 Job Code are automatically generated by Rapid Photo Downloader at the time of download, using a combination of the photo metadata and the job code entered by the user. That makes life easy!
Edit: I forgot to add that those same photo metadata elements can be used to automatically generate the filename too, reusing the job code if you like.
