Darktable in a weird state

Software darktable
1

I’ve been a Darktable user for years. This week something has gone wrong. I started up Darktable to import a batch of photos. It prompted me to do an update (I believe that’s what it was) and I accepted. I’m now on version 5.0.0, on Fedora. After doing my processing, I went back to reprocess one photo and Darktable hung. Waiting did not resolve it, so I accepted Fedora’s Force Quit suggestion, and I’ve done from time to time over the years. This time, when I reopened Darktable none of my edits were present in the history stack, apparently on any of my photos in the db. I looked at some old files, and the timestamps were unchanged. I opened some xmp files of photos I know I have edited, and they had what I would expect to see in the history stack. I tried touching one of these files and restarting Darktable to see if it would reload the xmp. Instead, the photo was entirely missing from Darktable. Now I’m unsure of what to try. I have a backup from a few weeks ago, so I could restore from that, but I don’t know if there’s some issue with this version of Darktable. I don’t really have enough free space to make multiple copies of my entire library to test this very completely. Are there any known issues or resolutions here? Suggestions for how to debug what’s going on? Thanks in advance.

2

hi and welcome. you can start darktable from the terminal with darktable -d common and share the result here.

3

Please post it in a txt file.

What version of fedora? Most versions should be in 5.0.1 by now.

4

Thank you for the replies. I’m on Fedora 41. Here’s the output of darktable -d common:
darktable.txt (1.9 KB)

5

F41 has 5.0.1 available via updates. sudo dnf update --refresh.

I see that darktable tried to start but your database is locked. It wont start until you address that.

6

I updated to 5.0.1 and tried again. In my last post, Darktable was already running when I ran darktable -d common, hence the lock files. Here it is again without that, after the update:
darktable.txt (26.6 KB)

I’m seeing the same type of behavior:

  1. I go to a photo I know I have processed
  2. I open the photo in the darkroom to check the history stack and see that my changes are missing
  3. I close Darktable and re-launch
  4. The photo I touched is now missing from Darktable
7

Have you always started DT with the --library flag?

1 Like
8

And what happens if you don’t use that flag?

9

Yes, I have been starting Darktable that way for many years. At one point I had multiple libraries, and I’ve kept the habit. Do you suspect that to be related to the behavior I’m seeing? I can try starting without the flag when I’m back at my other computer, but from what I recall it just starts Darktable pointing to a library at the default location, which I believe has nothing in it currently.