Take the 2-minute tour ×  Is there a way to give shotwell a
factory reset without deleting any of the original photos.  I
made a big mess of importing the wrong library followed by the
right library and now have 30,000 photos a lot of which are
duplicate and rather than sifting through them all I would have
thought it easier to start again.  Reinstalling shotwell does
not work. Emptying the photos to the trash deletes the original
file. Anything else I can do? Thanks  I am using 12.04.
share|improve this question  1 Answer 1  up vote 15 down vote
accepted  The best thing to do is to rename the .shotwell folder
in your home folder, as that contains all the thumbnails and
library information. Simply rename the current .shotwell to
.shotwell.backup and then load up shotwell. It will regenerate a
new .shotwell folder and you will be able to start again, and
you will also still have the old dot folder if there is anything
in there that you want. (Make sure you click the option to
enable hidden files in your file