Collection images as links?

Help
1

Hello and Thank You for developing Tellico.

I am moving away from GCStar which has served me well for years but it has become increasingly labor intensive to update in Arch. The import process from the GCStar is giving me empty files not sure why to I tried importing the CSV which works fine with images as pointers to the location in the filesystem of the images..

The issue I am having is that one collection is large and with many high res images so the import with setting to save images to file results in a very slow opening and usage of the program. With the setting to save images in a directory relative to the file improves opening and usage of the collection but with a significant duplication of image files (once in the filesystem where I keep my pictures and once in the Tellico created folder) Is there a way to tell Tellico to use the image location the filesystem on import? I see that there is a way to this but that means manually replacing each image in the collection with the “save link only” setting.

Thanks.

Tellico: 4.1.2
KDE Frameworks: 6.17.0
Qt: Using 6.9.1 and built against 6.9.1
Arch Linux (Wayland)
Build ABI: x86_64-little_endian-lp64
Kernel: linux 6.16.0-arch2-1

2

Hi, thanks for your question!

With an import from CSV, unfortunately no, there’s no way currently to tell Tellico to add the image as a link only value.

For your case, I probably need to fix the GCstar data importer somehow and add an option there (or to the CSV importer) to make images as links only. Would you be willing to share your GCstar data file with me privately? I’d like to fix hatever issue is causing the empty collection on the import and add the capability you’re looking for.

You can email me directly at robby@periapsis.org, if you like.

3

@rstephenson Thank you for the willingness to help me. I will send the GCstar file to your e-mail. On import, I see that Tellico entries are added but they contain only “mdate” entries. Peeking into the gcstar xml .gcs file, I cannot see how anything can be imported from that filke alone as it just lists “gcsfield” fields with no idea what the field actually is. GCstar does create a “GCModels” XML file with extension .gcm that does contain the GCstar fields (file that I will also e-mail). I do not see any setting in GCstar to save the fields description inside the .gcs file. Hope that makes sense.

4

Forgot to mention:

GCstar 1.8.0

5

Thanks for the test files. You’re exactly right - the custom collection by itself doesn’t have enough info for Tellico to know how to import it. I’ve got an update mostly working that reads the gcm file you mentioned..

Tracked in:

1 Like
6

A Thank you will not cut it …. but I will try: THANKS!

7

Thank you for the bug fixes. Some feedback/testing:

The Gcstar import of one of my custom collections is working fine and images are stored as links. The import creates a folder in the same location as the tellico file with the file name and “_files” added that only contains 2 files: gradient_header.png gradient_bg.png. Removing this folder does not seem to have any effect on the imported tellico file.

The CSV import is also working fine and saves the images as links (but still creates the same folder with the gradient files mentioned above). However:

  • on the CSV import process even if “First contains field titles” is checked you have to manually create new fields and map them. Maybe I remember incorrectly but on the previous version this was not the case but my memory is not what it used to be. But I understand that without the user telling tellico what the csv column contains in terms of data type will be hard to create the tellico xml.
  • If you map a date on the CSV the imports works fine and the date is displayed on the main screen but when edit the individual item the date is not displayed (this works fine for the gcstar import). I suspect it might have somehting to do with date format because in the gcstar import the date is shown as yyyy-mm-dd which shows in the edit window but in the csv import the date is shown as yyyy/mm/dd which the edit window does not seem to recognize..

If I can help further testing just let me know.

Again, thanks for the bug fixes that allowed me to move my migrate my custom gcstar collections to tellico.

8

For the CSV import, unless my memory is failing me too, I don’t think it ever created new fields on its own. For the date format, I’ll see if I can make that a little smarter.