Bug#575605: cheese: Stores files in an unexpected directory, without possibility to change it

[Simon McVittie]

On Sat, 27 Mar 2010 at 16:50:28 +0100, Eric Veiras Galisson wrote:
> if you take photos or videos with [cheese], you don't 
> know where they are stored and can't find these information.
> 
> With a bit of research, I found that these files are stored in 
> ~/.gnome2/cheese/media which is not a user-friendly place.

I came across this while experimenting with a minimal subset of GNOME 3.6.
If you have xdg-user-dirs installed (you may need to log out and back in
after installing it for it to take effect), Cheese will use a Webcam
subdirectory of the XDG Pictures and Videos directories; if not, it will
use the location you describe (which was its old default before it got
XDG support).

> Gnome Cheese FAQ [1] says that cheese will use XDG-directories to 
> store photos and videos, but are these XDG-directories specified 
> in Debian?

This particular set of XDG directories is the "user directories",
managed by the xdg-user-dirs package, and analogous to folders
like "My Pictures" in Windows.

Install xdg-user-dirs, log out, log back in, and look in
~/.config/user-dirs.dirs. The defaults in an English installation are
XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/Pictures" and XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="$HOME/Videos",
but they can be influenced by /etc/xdg/user-dirs.defaults and by your
locale. You can edit ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs to change the locations
used for these "special directories".

Perhaps cheese should have Recommends: xdg-user-dirs? (gnome, xfdesktop4
and sucrose already do, but that doesn't help users of LXDE, KDE or
no particular desktop environment.)

    S