Hello, I’ve been using Darktable pretty heavily for a year now and I’ve realized that it’s great for a lot of use cases, but that for my purposes (professional photography with hundreds or thousands of photos per week), it simply runs too slowly, crashes frequently, and is missing certain key features like lens support for several of my lenses. Basically, I just need an editor that is more fast and reliable for my professional work.
I still love Darktable for what it is, and I want to continue using it for my personal photos and special cases.
I’ve scoured the docs and the Internet and cannot find any info about how Lightroom will treat my Darktable xmp sidecar files. I definitely don’t want Lightroom to overwrite my Darktable xmp sidecar files, but I want Lightroom’s sidecar files for my peace of mind. I understand Darktable will play nicely with Lightroom’s sidecar files and create its own sidecars alongside the Lightroom ones. But what happens in the opposite direction? Will Lightroom create sidecars alongside, or destroy my precious Darktable sidecars?
@darix I am quite aware of the ability to create calibration data, file bugs, etc., and I’ve contributed lens data and logged bugs in the past and may do so in the future. The problem is that takes a lot of time to do, and I simply don’t have time to do it anymore. Again, I love DT, but for my professional use case, I’ve decided Lightroom is a better fit for me right now. I’m happy to go into more depth, if you want, as to point-by-point reasons why I’ve decided to switch (I have a big pros / cons list), but that’s a side topic I think.
My main question isn’t if XMP files are compatible. Obviously not. The two programs are totally different how they process raw files. I want to know if anyone has experience using both programs with XMP sidecars and if Lightroom will “play nice” with Darktable XMP files.
I would just play it safe and assume your sidecar files may be destroyed by other software at one point or the other.
Is it important data for you? Back it up.
Both darktable and lightroom have the option to not work with sidecar files at all, and use their respective databases.
Of you tell darktable to not bother with sidecar files, all the info will be in the darktable database. Lightroom can then do what it wants to. Or the other way around.
But if the data is precious to you, back it up before starting to use different pieces of software on the same Metadata store.
My experience when I still used Lightroom was that it completely ignored darktable’s sidecar files since they follow a different naming scheme. If Lightroom didn’t see them, Lightroom didn’t touch them. Keep in mind if you ever move photos using Lightroom’s browser, the darktable sidecars would simply get left behind.
This experience is from a while ago, and I would follow other’s suggestions to make backups if they’re important.
i’m interested to hear more about this. could you elaborate a bit? i get the part about crashes, that seems obvious. what exactly do you mean by “fast”? raw processing speed or streamlined workflow or ui design/kilometers traveled by mouse per finished image?
Indeed. I also have a similar problem, in that I use DT as my photo library, it is infinitely faster than LT when processing large amounts of photos and great with tagging and rating. I then export the rated ORF’s in another drive visible to LT and PS to complete processing. My question is, could there be a way to make DT write XMP’s in a way that LT could understand and use them? The other way around is possible, of course, I just hate to have to rewrite tags as my work volume is considerable.
As long as there’s no darktable related use case for changing the XMPs into a lightroom useable format, no one would spend effort to change it.
But it’s not that complex to extract the the relevant tags from the darktable xmp and create a lightroom compatible xmp yourself (e.g. by using a lua script)
This is a longstanding and issue. dt devs have so far shown no understanding that xmp is primarily a format for tags and metadata as you can see from this tread. dt considers xmp to be a format primarily for saving “edits” ie processing settings and therefore it uses a non standard file naming convention.
If you want to transfer tags I guess workflow would be to
backup all xmp files
rename all xmp files to follow the standard
The above is fairly trivial for a “super user” but may be a lot of work for someone not comfortable with specialist tools or the command line.
One the xmp files are all renamed lightroom should pick up metadata. It may be a good idea to manuall test on a few files using the file manager rename function first.
