Shotwell won't import pictures

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1

Hi, Shotwell cannot import new pictures anymore. To be more specific:

  • I am trying to import some pictures from a given folder on my local hard drive (no network drive),
  • I ask to import with copy,
  • Shotwell fails with no error message in the logs, just saying “failure to import due to file error or hardware error”, which is not super helpful.

I run Fedora 40, Shotwell 0.32.8 (as flatpak).

If I try to import without copy, then it works.
If I try to import with copy, Shotwell does create the target folder hierarchy (e.g. 2024/09/13, etc.), but does not copy a single file.

This used to work perfectly fine.

The problem does not come from the pictures:

  • I used to be able to import pictures taken with the same device (a Google Pixel phone),
  • I tried to import some random pictures from some other source, it did fail as well.

Any idea what’s going on? How could I debug this?

2

I’m not a flatpak user, but this advice seems to come up a lot;
Do you need to configure the flatpak to allow access to your folder?

3

Thanks Barry, I tried:

flatpak override --filesystem=/home/myusername/ --user

The command succeeded (if I run flatpak info --show-permissions org.gnome.Shotwell, I see the new permission to access my user home directory), but it did not change anything when it comes to importing…

4

Have a look at this application and check the permissions. The directory you are trying to import from might no be accessible.

5

Thanks, Flatseal did the trick, the command I used above was not enough apparently…
Not clear why Shotwell stopped working all of a sudden in the first place, but issue is fixed now.