Duplicate item (not photo)

Feature request
1

Is it currently possible to duplicate an item? This would be useful in cases where two items have similar and lengthy metadata. Thank you very much :slight_smile:

2

Duplicating is not a separate action, right now, because the idea is to implement duplication via copy/paste. We’re still lacking the ‘import’ functionality for this to work, but soon you should be able to copy an item and then paste it into the same project in order to duplicate it.

That said, what you can do already is:

  • Duplicate a photo in the item you wish to copy (right click on the photo and select ‘duplicate photo’)
  • Then select the duplicated photos, right click and ‘move photo to new item’

This will duplicate the item and move the photo to it.

3

Could you clarify: Do you mean you want to copy the entire item, including both metadata and image, or just metadata? In other words, do you want to be able to copy one item’s metadata onto another, where they only differ in one or two fields?

4

I’d love to be able to duplicate metadata. I might have three, or 30, impressions of the same print from different collections, or the same illustration used in different editions of different books. If I could duplicate just the metadata and then manually change a few fields, I could save hours.

Alternatively, I’d like to be able to duplicate an entry (metadata + image) and then replace the image and consolidate the record, but that wouldn’t be as efficient.

5

OK, that makes sense. We’ll definitely consider it!

6

I think you can actually do this already using bulk editing. If you have a given item with metadata and you want to save the same metadata to, let’s say 30 other items you can follow these steps:

  1. Select the item containing the right metadata.
  2. Then select the other 30 items holding the shift or cmd/ctrl keys; there are different ways to select multiple items, it does not matter how you do it, but the important thing is that you select the item with the correct metadata first.
  3. The metadata panel will switch to bulk editing mode: in this mode you’ll see the data combined data of all the items; if the items contain different values, the contents will appear greyed out. If you click into a field and then press enter it will be applied to all items. So, in order to set the first items title to all the 30 items:
  4. Click into the title field (the field should contain the first item’s title) and press Enter.
  5. Do this for all the fields you wish to apply to all the items.

If you make a mistake, you can undo the change.

7

That’s the best workaround I can find. But it means entering metadata for each field each time, which adds up for a large photo library. I’d love to be able to click on fields to ‘copy’ then ‘paste’ them to other photos’ metadata fields, which would considerably reduce the time and risk of typos.

8

You’re right, something like copy/paste for all metadata is an interesting feature idea. I’ll add a an issue on GitHub to track it!

Because you mentioned that you have to enter the metadata each time, do you mean just pressing ‘Enter’ or actually entering the metadata again? Because the latter should not be necessary: if you click into the field the current value (or the first item) should already be there, so you just need to confirm it by pressing ‘Enter’.