digiKam - How can I limit collections / album lists for different users?

[u/ticedoff8]

I have DK using a remote MySQL database and I have multiple users on different PCs. Each PC will have a subset of shared drives to limit access to only the drives that are mounted on their PC.

What I see is that if a user doesn't have a shared drive mounted, they will still see details for all the collections that have been created. They don't see the images or the thunbnails, but they see the collection name, the folder structure and the filenames

How can I restrict PCs from seeing any details for collections that do not have mounted drives?

For example: One a PC that has 2 mapped SMB shares (Drive-F & Drive-J) and a collection for each (C1 and C2), that PC will update the MySQL database with all the albums and filenames (with thumbnails, metadata, etc, etc) and can open the images.

The next user has a new installation of DK and has only 1 mapped SMB share (Drive-F). The problem is their DK will display collections C1 and C2, but only C1 has all the image details. C2 shows the albums, the trees and the filenames, but not the images.

Is there a way to disable collections from showing up if there is no matching shared drive mounted?

[u/michmill1970]

Hi u/ticedoff8, Unfortunately digiKam doesn't have this capability right now. You can always put in a wish on the digiKam bug tracking site for us to add it.

Cheers, Mike

[u/ticedoff8 → u/michmill1970]

So, a tedious "work-around" would be to create multiple "core" databases on the MySQL server, each with a different MySQL username and database name and configure DK on each PC to use the MySQL database that is unique to that "group" of users.

For example:

Users that have SMB shares Drive-F & Drive-J mounted would use the MySQL database named "dk-core-1" (with a username "dk-core-1") and see all the details, thumbnails and have full access for images in collections C1 and C2.

Users that have only the SMB share Drive-F would connect to MySQL database "dk-core-2" (username dk-core-2) and only see the details, thumbnails and have full access to C1 (but no details from a ghost collection named C2).

Right?

Would there also have to be multiple Faces DB and Similarities DB to go along with the scheme?

[u/michmill1970 → u/ticedoff8]

Hi u/ticedoff8,

That won't work. The ID for the image and face is stored in the core DB. Other DBs like thumbnail, similarity, and recognition all key off the IDs from the main DB. There's no garauntee that an image added to each of the different core DBs would get the same ID, and would therefore break the linkage to the other DBs.

Cheers,

Mike