I don’t think this is a darktable bug. Last month i was fixing a rating tag bug, so i read thru most of the code that handles the xmp.
Can you go back thru your steps again? Start at the top, image is in SD card.
Hi g-man,
Not sure how to explain it, but now it seems to work, even when I choose to write sidecar file ‘on import’. From then on, however, all changes to ratings must be made from within Darktable. Once sidecar file was created Darktable did not detect changes in ratings that were made in Bridge, even after re-importing. In preferences, ‘Look for updated xmp files on startup’ is checked. So, my choice is now to write the sidecar file ‘after edit’.
On a second thought, perhaps all this had something to do with behaviour not of the software but of the HD itself, such as sleeping.
Here are my workflow steps:
- From within Bridge, I download images from SD card and convert the native raw camera formats (Canon, Sony) to .dng files which are then stored on hard disk in a folder structure created in Bridge’s Photo Downloader page (Year/Year-Month).
- In Bridge, I add metadata to and rate (1 star) photos I wish to work on in Darktable.
- I open Darktable, and from import → add to library I choose the folder on the HD with the photos I wish to process. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a way to import only those photos I rated back in Bridge (have an idea how to do that? It would be a nice feature). Instead, I create a collection based on rating.
- From there I move to Darkroom for processing the files in the collection.
Thanks for taking the time to look into this.
That is perfectly normal: dt uses a different naming scheme for its sidecar files, and reads the Bridge sidecar when there’s no dt sidecar yet. dt also will not write to the Bridge sidecar. That is done to help migration, the aim isn’t/wasn’t to have both used together (keep in mind that at the time this was implemented, dt was not available for windows). So that part works just as described in the manual section linked above
While that works, it’s not the best way to treat raw files: .DNGs don’t always conserve all the information from the original raw files, and dt is quite able to handle canon and sony raw files (except for the newest formats, perhaps). So in most cases, converting to DNG doesn’t have any advantages (archiving them is going to be just as much a headache as with any other digital format, the hardware is probably obsolete before the software)
And DNG is not an open standard format, but still owned by Adobe. So in that respect, while better documented, it isn’t better than the camera raw formats (they still have to deal with the undocumented “maker note” sections in the raw files).
Of course, DNG files from cameras that produce them natively are not a problem, they work just like any other native format (CR2, ARW, ORF, …)
Good advice. The only reason I converted the files to DNG was that one of them might find its way into Photoshop. But it’s quite rare.