Hey all, Darktable has started crashing today, and I wondered if anyone can point me in the right direction.
I’d noticed this behaviour the other day. I had been applying a parametric mask, and I was dragging in the feathering anchors (for want of knowing what they’re actually called!). I tried to drag an anchor closer to the mask, it snapped off to a sharp angle, and then DT crashed. On opening the app, it was fine again.
However, today, the same thing happened, but now every time I open darktable, it opens back to that same image in Light table, and then immediately crashed. I can’t get it to open and stay open.
I rebooted my machine, hoping that this would resolve the issue, but nothing has changed.
This opens a fresh instance that won’t reload the problematic image.
To recover your main library, find the XMP sidecar file for the crashing image — it’s in the same folder as the photo, with the same name but .xmp extension (e.g. IMG_1234.CR3.xmp). Rename or delete it to reset the editing history for that image. Then start darktable normally.
If you can share the crash report, it would help track down the bug. Check ~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/ for a file named darktable_*.ips — the most recent one after the crash.
After finding the problematic .xmp, you can restore your edit if you want. You need to restore the sidecar but find out which history entry is causing the problem. That involves deleting sections from the file. You can start at the end because it’s probably the last one.
I actually wonder if it IS the sidecar to the one I was working on. I’ve renamed that one, and one either side of it to xxxxx(old).xmp, and it still crashes.
You need to move the image as well, because darktable has a library of image edits that’s redundant with the sidecars.
If that fails, back up the directory (or be very, very careful about what you do) and move half the directory away and restart darktable. If it still crashes, do the other half. By doing half at a time (i.e., when you know the bad file is one of six files, try letting darktable see three of them), you can find the problem relatively quickly.
If you find a problematic .xmp, I’m curious whether that’s enough for other people to produce (and fix) the crash, even without the image.
