Can we move a user’s images to another?

[Rémi_Muller]

Hello,

It is the first time I write here. My name is Rémi Muller and I am an engineer at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris.
I am currently doing tests on OMERO before expanding its use in the laboratory.

I have a question. Can we move all the images from one user to another?
Indeed, when a user leaves the laboratory, I need to recover all his images.

Do I have to download all his images on my computer and then loading them into my own space in Omero ?

Thank you in advance for your answers,

Sincerely,

[mtbc]

I don't believe that the current clients expose such a feature, I'm afraid. The 5.0 OMERO server API does offer a change-ownership request object named omero::cmd::Chown with which at least administrators can change the ownership of data. You may wish to try writing a script (adapting one of the Chgrp examples may be easiest) and testing it on data to see if it already works adequately, but something may go wrong so use just throwaway data and carefully inspect the outcome. (If you do see anything oddly wrong from it, let us know and we will add that case to our test suite.)

Separately, the 5.1 line introduces omero::cmd::Chown2 which aims to supersede the original, but I consider it to be too lightly tested. (Current permissions testing focuses on the forthcoming read-write collaborative groups.) For change-ownership, presently we are working on,

• refactoring the omero::cmd::Chown2 work to make sure it does exactly what we intend
• expanding the test coverage of omero::cmd::Chown2 so that it is more trustworthy and we can recommend its use without caveats.

Once these are complete, you can expect some later release in the 5.1 line to expose a convenient change-ownership function in the clients, at the very least as a plugin for the OMERO command-line interface.

We certainly appreciate how much it will help our users when OMERO can do this well, so this feature is now on our priority shortlist and there will be ongoing effort from the core team until a more solid version of change-ownership is released.

Cheers,
Mark

[mtbc]

As you are new to OMERO I should have added that http://help.openmicroscopy.org/sharing-data.html may give you some good hints for interim workarounds. For instance, perhaps the user's data could be moved to a read-only group of which those who need to see it are also a member. That is a typical workflow that should work reliably.

Cheers,
Mark