This is not exactly a bug report but rather a feature request. 

My laptop hard drive is running out of space so I decided to put my entire photo library (33000+ pictures, 160 Gb) on a dedicated external hard drive. The process went smoothly ... until I found out that trying to browse my library without the hard drive connected to my laptop resulted in Shotwell placing all my pictures in the Missing files view since they are not "physically" accessible. I won't be traveling all the time with my external hard drive so this is pretty annoying ...

Is there any way to circumvent this behavior and be able to browse the Shotwell library without the external hard drive connected, using only the thumbnails ? Some of my friends within the Windows environnement told me that they can do this with Adobe Lightroom for example.

This would mean having a "disconnected" mode in Shotwell which would even make browsing huge photo libraries faster since only thumbnails would be used.