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It's is nearly impossible to store all photos on your laptop/netbook HDD (unless you have a 1tb beast ), especially when original photos are 2-5mb in size.

Storing them all in external is not comfortable because you just can't have external drive always with you and you can't enjoy them any time

My idea is to have 3 places for keeping all your photos
Dock (temp): a temporary folder to drag and drop photos for managing them.
Local (in internal media): Keeps only hardly resized/compressed copies (eg 1mpix jpg's) of the photos. So user can share them with friends make slide-shows etc.
Archive (in external media): Keeps original files. (hdd, cd, dvd, etc). Original files are kept if user would like to print/photo-shop those photos.

Real life method:
User plugs in a memory card/USB and transfers all photos to a Dock
Then deletes unnecessary photos, crops, tags, categorizes, pins them, removes red eyes, etc (all the boring stuff )
After finishing, user press a big red STORE THEM button. Then digiKam makes thumbs for Local storage and moves original files to Archive

If photo is pinned, original photo is stored in both in Local and in Archive. He'd likes to print that only photo. If later user pins a local thumb, original photo will be downloaded.

If user deletes/modifies photo, digiKam as, does she have to do the same to Archive copy.

If Archive is unplugged, digiKam makes a queue and executed it as soon as Archive is plugged.

OK your idea is : storing all compressed photos in the internal drive, to share them with a lesser (but acceptable quality, setup a temp directory to modify the original and an external support with the originals.

+1 great idea

david.

You actually can do that right away now as digiKam supports multiple different databases.

Setup a three different paths from digiKam settings.

One for Originals
One for Archive (backup, originals)
One for quick daily use.

You can setup a batchjob for photos and save them to be executed to other set if wanted. It is still not automatic and never will as it is not wise at all that modifying photos is automatic, even that if you would have backup somewhere, as then you dont have backup anymore. (Backup means you need at least to identical copy of the same file).

I have similar setup already.

All RAW files goes to external drive and desktop drive. Netbook has just for temporarily storage for RAW when on the road.
Then all the edits goes for external drive and desktop drive and netbook.

I can anytime, anywhere pull edited photos, but with netbook I need to connect a external drive to get originals if wanted to edit again. On desktop I can check edits or originals...

The real deal braker what makes things impossible (currently) is that we can not redo all actions from smaller photo (1Mpix JPEG) what was done on road to bigger (14Mpix RAW) files at home.

Like cropping is impossible, We can redo a curve or color mixes or rescaling. But only once when it is done from original -> new. But it is impossible to do orignal -> edited small -> new edited redo at all.