I’m looking to start using darktable, and I’ve played with it before, but there’s a feature I don’t precisely understand—
The base filmroll directory implies this directory is where items are duplicated into the folder. This… doesn’t make sense I think for the modern world in any way, since SD cards are frequently upwards of 256GB, so storing their duplicates into the local directory of the initial install seems like, well a bad idea.
Can someone explain this more clearly as to the roll of this folder? And possibly, if the local caching database associated to those files can be set to off-disk, possibly local to the hard drive that’s actually using it?
Welcome to darktable. In my understanding, the “film roll” is just a link to the actual folder with your image files, nothing is copied by darktable.
My workflow: I copy the image files from the camera card to a folder on my disk and then import that folder on disk into darktable. The images themselves remain in place, darktable only points to them.
A “film roll” points to a selection of images from the database. That can be the equivalent of a folder on disk, but also the results of a search.
But selecting a film roll does not duplicate anything, the image files have to be in darktable’s database already. To get images in darktable’s database, you have to import them first, through the import module in the lighttable view.
And even then, files will only be copied if you select “copy & import…”. The option “add to library…” just reads in the metadata from the files you select (and will not copy or move any files).
That helps a lot, somehow I had come under the impression that copy-and-import was the only way to really get things added into darktable, but the add-to-library functionality works just as well. Got it.
So when I’m making updates and changing things, it will load “work” into the folder the original file is in? Or does it write to the default filmroll in C:? If I’m deleting files off an imported library on let’s say the G:\ drive, is it designed to delete the items off? Or does that only work for import-and-copy’ed files?