having moved over from Lightroom (didn’t renew the license yesterday!), I have adapted and re-considered my workflow on my Mac and love it so far.
However, although I’m not a professional, I also like to quickly browse through my SD cards at the end of the day during a trip, rating images, maybe entering tags etc. I don’t have a laptop for this but only take my iPad Pro. I backup SD cards on a thumb drive every night. That’s when I could do my browsing and rating. I found an app that can display my RAW files and write XMP-sidecars when I enter a rating (FileBrowser Pro). The sidecars are Lightroom style (filename.xmp instead of filename.ext.xmp), but darktable imports this kind of sidecar and creates its own additionally.
I thought I found my perfect workflow. I even considered doing the sidecar creation directly on the SD card. However, darktable only imports the sidecar files, when I do an “import…”, so all images and sidecars need to be on my photo SSD in the correct folder, i.e. I have to copy everything manually before import. Sadly, darktable seems to ignore existing sidecars when I do a “copy & import” from thumb drives or SD cards. Is that the correct behaviour? Is there a setting with which I can toggle sidecar import for “copy & import”? I’d LOVE to have this option because I like the automatic folder creation and file re-naming.
Thanks for the swift reply and the link. I must’ve read an older or different version of this section, could swear it didn’t have anything about reading and creating XMP files.
Hm. Bummer. Then it shall be "backing up, renaming on the thumb drive, culling / rating, copying manually WITH sidecards, using “Add to library” only.
Or maybe I just enjoy my evenings and do all the culling and rating at home.
For what it is worth I do my culling in the darkroom view of darktable. I shoot a lot of bracketed exposures and with my Canon R7 and G16 the best images for detail and noise are the brightest images without clipping of the highlights. I turn on the raw clipping indicator in the darkroom view and this helps me decide which of the three bracketed shots to edit and which to delete as surplus. I would recommend enjoying your evenings and rating images at home.
I could even understand why that would be the default for “copy & import”, but really cannot understand why read the sidecar is the default on “add to library” and not allowed on “copy & import”, on two very similar operations.
That’s the reason I used “add to library” since the beginning, until now, when Rapid Photo Downloader stopped being available in Fedora and I was exploring different workflows to import photos.
