I routinely shoot RAW+JPG on my Fuji cameras, and have dt set to write XMPs only after edits.
I’ve previously always used Rapid Photo Downloader (RPD) to rename and transfer image files from SD cards to my network storage, and then used ‘add to library’ to import into dt from the NAS. XMPs only appear after edits, as espected.
But I’ve just been trying dt’s ‘copy and import’ to import files direct from SD to network storage with appropriate directory creation and file renaming. I was surprised to see that dt always creates an XMP for the JPGs (but not the RAWs), regardless of the config being set to create them only ‘after edits’.
I don’t really want all my JPGs to get XMPs automatically. I’d be grateful if anyone can suggest how to stop this behaviour in ‘copy and import’.
(I’m guessing that dt does some processing on all JPGs during import, and so treats them as having been edited, and therefore creates an XMP? Is there any way of preventing this?)
No processing is done until you open the images in the darkroom, unless perhaps you have done Lua script apply something? To the best of my knowledge, automatically applied presets are only applied when you open the image in the darkroom.
I’ll try to reproduce this on my machine. Normally, I copy the images using a file manager, and I have darktable create the sidecars on import.
@kofa Thanks for your quick reply. I don’t use Lua scripts, and the JPG XMPs appear in the NAS share directory immediately on ‘copy and import’, before I’ve touched anything at all.
I’ve double-checked Preferences > storage, and the XMP setting is definitely 'Write sidecar file for each image “after edit”.
And it’s especially a mystery as the manual section on Storage > xmp says,
" after edit: An XMP file will be written the first time you perform an edit on an image and will be updated on each subsequent edit. Importing will not generate an XMP file by default."
[emphasis added]
I should also say that I see exactly the same behaviour on my Debian install of dt 4.3 Master, which is a vanilla install where the image files get imported into the default ~/Pictures/Darktable directory.
I won’t have time to check this today, but as you’ve reproduced this on several systems, even using the master branch, I think you should open a bug report.