custom metadata in darktable ?

Hello,
I shoot mainly film (large format) and usually have the speed / aperture / camera / lens / … written on my notebook, along with other details (amount of tilt/shift, purpose, location and so on).
Playing with darktable, I can only see a metadat editor which is limited for my needs.
The EXIF info is not relevant (it’s scanner info).

Is there any way to extend the metadata panel ? or any to create a custom metadata template to replace the current one ?
Any suggestion ?

thanks

I am using a special tag subtree for similar information:

image

In English:

  • Analog
    • Development
      • < Company >
    • Film
      • < Make >
        • < Type >
  • Camera
    • < Model >
  • Negative
  • Reverse order

(My canon cameras do the latter.)

The tag tree is very flexible, and I always dreamt of making a tag based workflow interface in Lua. Unfortunately I am lacking the time and the programming skills. But you can implement arbitrary data storage with tags and base your workflow on that information.

Yes, using a tag tree with a careful hierarchy, that’s a solution.
My concern with tags (notwithstanding the mess in my tag database) is that it’s not very descriptive. It’s perfect for lens identification or film type, but less useful for something like ‘focus on first tree on the left and 5deg rotation to get the last one focused too’ . Maybe the ‘description’ textbox in ‘metadat editor’ for this …

thanks

XMP is extensible, so you can legally add your own tags.

In the standard XMP tags, there is a description tag, and I believe a note tag.

I’ve used XMP in PDF pretty extensively for work, so if you have more questions, please ask!

I’m working on wrangling my own tags, taxonomies, and geotagging right now, and I can pretty easily develop some xslt tools to help with tagging, but I’m unsure of my own needs currently.

The XMP could be modified with my own namespace and properties, but it’s going to stay in the XMP sidecar file. Even if I write a script to insert my key/values in the XMP file, darktable won’t be able to use it - and might overwrite it.

My initial concern was to understand if darktable could be (easily) extended to support a custom set of properties, but I suspect it would need significant changes to support this in the database and in the GUI.

Darktable’s Lua interface is probably the easiest place to do this: https://www.darktable.org/usermanual/ch09.html.php