Comment 8 for bug 797117

Daisy,

first, to be clear, there are no symbolic links involved in this situation. Shotwell simply imports the photos in question into its database in their current filesystem locations. (Shotwell will never, in fact, create a symbolic link). In earlier versions of Shotwell we referred to this behavior as "linking", but people found that confusing so we now call it "importing in place".

I can understand that it may not have been obvious why the copy/no copy dialog didn't appear for you. I've created a ticket upstream (http://redmine.yorba.org/issues/4502) for possibly displaying a dialog as you suggest. Also, I think that before long we may display a set of options on every import, and once we're doing that we could simply disable the copy option in this situation; that might make things a little clearer.