Picasa UNCs (Network Shares)

I have a central server, running a RAID5 array. I store all my important files here including my pictures. The server is backed up in addition to the RAID5 array.

Now we also have a number of laptops in the house, including my wifes. I wanted to keep all the pictures central, but allowing my wife to view them all from her laptop.

Easy I thought, I’ll just add a UNC to folder manager in picasa… lol. Nope Picasa does not support UNCs, after traipsing the net and trying to modify the watchedfolders.txt file for picasa (with limited success). Something reminded me of what I did to share a USB drive from within a existing local folder (its in another blog post). I used mklink.

mklink comes with Vista and 7. It allows to create file and folder links within existing folders, and as a bonus it allows for uncs to be used.

So with Picasa running on the laptop looking at the local pictures folder, I then created a directory junction using mklink that pointed to the server share.

Picasa now sees that folder as nothing more than a subfolder and as such just scans through the folders.

C:\Users\<username>\Pictures>mklink /d <~NewFolderName> \\<Servername>\<servershare>

Now I use ~ at the beginning of files and folders to ensure they appear at the top of any listing. Just reminds me that the folders/files have special significance. (So is you don’t want a tilde on the folder name just leave it out here.

I hope that helps someone.. I am currently sitting here waiting for picasa to finish cycling through the folders….

Picasa UNCs (Network Shares)

Ubuntu: Rhythmbox: clear out library

After importing some folders I wanted to clear out some entries, and reimport. I am sure there should be an option to do this in the GUI but it appears there is not.

Library management is pretty poor in my opinion.

Anyway to do this I had to delete the following file, and restart rhythmbox. 

~/.local/share/rhythmbox/rhythmdb.xml 

~ is linux shorthand for your user folder /home/ /home//.local/share/rhythmbox/ 


This works for ubuntu 11.04 and Rhythmbox 0.13.3.  It has been known for them to keep moving the the file around, so if you have a different version this may be in a different location. The file should be the same so you should be able to search for it.

Ubuntu: Rhythmbox: clear out library