I think it would be interesting to have a way to recursively import a local directory without actually moving files around. And to be able to checksum these files as well (without moving them into the annex).
This would work somewhat similar to looping over a directory and adding file:// remotes for each file.
A use case is importing optical media (read-only), whilst keeping that media as a remote, and being able to calculate checksums directly without moving any files around.
For single files, it would also be interesting if addurl had a "--localchecksum" option that would only work for file:// urls, and make it checksum files directly from their source location?)
A directory special remote with importtree=yes and
git-annex import--no-content` can be used to do this. done --Joey
Recursively adding urls is already feasiable with some simple scripting:
https://gitorious.org/arand-scripts/arand-scripts/blobs/master/annex-importdir
but this is obviously missing the checksumming bit though.
See also: Managing a large number of files archived on many pieces of read-only medium (E.G. DVDs) particularly this comment
This would be really augmented if the assistant and webapp could watch external folders and automatically add new files that appeared. Then e.g. your system logs and family photos could be archived together without maintenance needed. I'm running into this on android, wherw I'd like to store files my phone produces alongside my other files.