The package is not available in the Fedora repository anymore. Fedora was the first distro to package Rapid Photo Downloader, about 15 years ago. The long-term maintainer is no longer maintaining the package, and no one else has picked it up. In my experience as the Rapid Photo Downloader developer, it’s actually exceedingly rare to hear from a distro package maintainer — so I know have no idea if the maintainer retired or moved onto other things, etc. In any case, for many years they did the work and I am thankful for that.
The instructions for building Rapid Photo Downloader from source at GitHub are aimed at package maintainers, not end users. I’m not in a position to be able to update them for end-users because of my ongoing health problems (a serious case of Long Covid). It might seem like a simple thing to update the instructions, but in reality it’s somewhat overwhelming — things move pretty quickly in the Python packaging world, and there is new stuff to learn that I cannot cognitively cope with at present.
So if you really want to use Rapid Photo Downloader, for now I can only suggest another distro.
One more thing — making Rapid Photo Downloader into a Flatpak or Snap is much, much harder than you might imagine. Sandboxing a program like Rapid Photo Downloader means breaking a lot of its functionality, e.g. detecting and working with cameras, etc. Creating mechanisms to work around these issues is highly technical and complex.
The package was an orphan for quite some time and nobody picked it up. So it was removed from Fedora as it didn’t have a maintainer. If you want the package in Fedora it is easy to revive it. Someone just needs to maintain it …
Did noticed that, one of my computers runs on Fedora, and even prior to 43 the version available was a bit outdated. My workflow relies a lot in RPD, so I’m crossing my fingers this gets sorted out, not sure how I’m able to help though.
I tried building and installing it myself, building the dist works, but it fails when I try to pip install it…
procopio@dhaller:~/rapid-photo-downloader$ pip install dist/rapid_photo_downloader-0.9.37a6.tar.gz
Defaulting to user installation because normal site-packages is not writeable
Processing ./dist/rapid_photo_downloader-0.9.37a6.tar.gz
Installing build dependencies … done
Getting requirements to build wheel … done
Preparing metadata (pyproject.toml) … error
error: subprocess-exited-with-error
× Preparing metadata (pyproject.toml) did not run successfully.
│ exit code: 1
╰─> [26 lines of output]
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/usr/lib/python3.14/site-packages/pip/_vendor/pyproject_hooks/_in_process/_in_process.py”, line 389, in
main()
~~~~^^
File “/usr/lib/python3.14/site-packages/pip/_vendor/pyproject_hooks/_in_process/_in_process.py”, line 373, in main
json_out[“return_val”] = hook(**hook_input[“kwargs”])
~~~~^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
File “/usr/lib/python3.14/site-packages/pip/_vendor/pyproject_hooks/_in_process/_in_process.py”, line 178, in prepare_metadata_for_build_wheel
whl_basename = backend.build_wheel(metadata_directory, config_settings)
File “/tmp/pip-build-env-br9_r6wk/overlay/lib/python3.14/site-packages/hatchling/build.py”, line 58, in build_wheel
return os.path.basename(next(builder.build(directory=wheel_directory, versions=[“standard”])))
~~~~^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
File “/tmp/pip-build-env-br9_r6wk/overlay/lib/python3.14/site-packages/hatchling/builders/plugin/interface.py”, line 149, in build
build_hook.initialize(version, build_data)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
File “/tmp/pip-build-env-br9_r6wk/overlay/lib/python3.14/site-packages/hatch_gettext/plugin.py”, line 373, in initialize
self.do_work(build_data)
~~~~~~~~~~~~^^^^^^^^^^^^
File “/tmp/pip-build-env-br9_r6wk/overlay/lib/python3.14/site-packages/hatch_gettext/plugin.py”, line 330, in do_work
self.load_gettextbuild_config()
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~^^
File “/tmp/pip-build-env-br9_r6wk/overlay/lib/python3.14/site-packages/hatch_gettext/plugin.py”, line 170, in load_gettextbuild_config
raise ValueError(
…<3 lines>…
)
ValueError: Configure “po-directory” in “[tool.hatch.build.hooks.gettext]” in pyproject.toml to the project’s po directory [default: “po”], and ensure the directory exists.
[end of output]
note: This error originates from a subprocess, and is likely not a problem with pip.
error: metadata-generation-failed
× Encountered error while generating package metadata.
╰─> See above for output.
note: This is an issue with the package mentioned above, not pip.
hint: See above for details.
I really really hope someone knowledgeable will adopt this poor orphan before end of support of Fedora 42. There are very few clean mainstream distros with vanilla Gnome environment. Debian is a bit too conservative, Arch is a almost too much on edge, Fedora is perfect balance.
The other possibility is to use a virtual machine. I had one during the times I still had a Windows computer. I will retrieve it for when I have to upgrade to Fedora 43. For the time being, I leave the computer on f42.
The idea is to have a light Debian-based distro running in a virtual machine, such as Q4OS, or AntiX, without all the programs coming with a complete distro, and install RPD in the VM. Then give it access to the USB connection with the camera, and off you go!
Thanks Damon for this note.
So, it is only necessary to enable this unofficial repository to continue having Rapid Photo Downloader in Fedora 43
The command is:
dnf copr enable vgaetera/extras
and after that, the upgrade to Fedora 43 will keep RPD active.
Great!!!
