Proposal: Specifying path to photos in Preferences panel

[Willem Ferguson]

Robert,

There are a few reasons why the path to a whole collection of photos can 
change.

1) With re reconfiguration or re-installation of an operating system, 
the existing path may not be re-implementable (this happened to me 
recently, I solved it using sed to change the path data in the XML dive 
log, but I think this is a dangerous approach).
2) The whole photo collection may be moved to a different external 
drive, NAS or server.

I suspect these are the most frequent cases where the path to the photos 
changes. If this is the case, I propose that the path to the (largest?) 
collection of photos is specified in the Preferences panel. If either 
the path or the physical location of the collection changes, the user 
need just specify the new path. This is much simpler than requiring 
Subsurface to use hashes for discovering ALL the images in the 
collection. The mechanism of using the fingerprints is then useful for 
solving specific smaller-scale problems in finding images, not the 
entire collection. It also allows the user to access either the primary 
photo collection or the backup collection, if necessary and just gives a 
smooth mechanism of accessing images that may be located in different 
places.

I am not sure whether you will think this is useful at all. I have 
thought a bit about how one would implement something like this and a 
proposal is that, if an image lies in the main photo repository, the 
first character of the path+file name in the dive log is a # character 
or some other printable character. When encountering this #, Subsurface 
prepends the path from the Preferences panel, else it assumes the path 
from the dive log to be the complete path to the image.

Kind regards,
Willem