Darktable Workflow: Keeping either JPEG or RAW, deleting other

Dear forum,

I am wondering how to implement/find a workflow in darktable that I assume many people have:

  • My camera takes both JPEG and RAW photos.
  • After importing them, they are grouped together.
  • I then go through all images (usually collapsing the group to just the JPEG) and decide to either keep the JPEG or the RAW (which I edit in darkroom then).
  • I always make sure that the group leader is the image I want to keep.
  • Now at the end of this review process, I want to delete all photos that I don’t need, i.e. the group followers, to save storage space.

However, I do not find a way to select just the group followers. I think an older version of darktable had this at some point (under the name “grouping”), but this seems to have moved or deleted. Is there some other way how I can filter to just the followers? Or a different and easier approach to implement this workflow without group leaders/followers? As I said, I assume this must be a common workflow, so maybe I’m missing sth. how to implement this?

I could of course do this manually by not collapsing raw and JPEG and deciding for each image manually. However, that feels a bit like overhead: I see all images twice (instead of just assessing whether I like the JPEG), if I have to delete an image I have to do it twice, and similar also for rating images.

I highly recommend that you not delete the raw files. Storage is cheaper than your time.

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I agree with Mica that you NEVER want to delete the RAW and just keep the JPG. I shoot in Raw plus JPG. I edit all my RAW files that are worth keeping and mark some RAW files for deletion. 99.9% of the time my RAW file edits are better than the out of camera JPG. At the end of editing I usually select all my JPGs and delete them. In your case you could use a star rating or color rating to identify the JPG and maybe even the RAW files you want to keep.

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My camera saves raw and low res jpg. The jpg are only for the case where someone wants some quick samples. Most of the time I just delete them, final images are only processed raws.

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I copy over raw+jpg to my pc, then fire up a quick file viewer to see the jpg’s on a big screen and remove those pictures that are not ok (focus, composition or other shortcomings). The trick is that the viewer I use (gqview on Linux), will jump from jpg to jpg when scrolling through but will delete raw+jpg in one go. After this initial scan I simply move all raws to a final directory for processing with DT and delete the jpg’s.

Only exception to this are panorama’s. I usually use the jpeg’s as a first test for stitching together

Thanks for answering!

Unfortunately my question was not answered yet. To quickly address the points:

  • I want to sometimes keep the RAWs and sometimes keep the JPEGs. I do not want to keep all RAW files.
  • I want to use Darktable and not some other software.

If you don’t make an edit I think there is an unmodifed tag in DT…maybe you can use that in a filter and it will grab any files raw or otherwise that you did not edit

image

Maybe worth a try… I dont’ have time to confirm sorry…

The group_leaders and group_followers collection filters were removed in 4.8, since no one could come up with a use case for them. Of course as soon as we do that someone does come up with a use case :rofl:.

This is really a custom workflow, especially the part about deleting the group follower files. This can easily be implemented as a Lua script, which will provide a better user interface and a safety net.

The script could provide a shortcut that checks all the images in the collection for group leaders. When it finds them it can remove the database record for the follower image, then move the image file to a unused_followers sub-directory, just in case the user might want them back. If not, then the user can remove the directory to destroy the files. A key could be added to the selected images module, so that selected groups could have their followers removed.

I can write the script, since I was the one that caused the group_followers filter to be removed :smile:

Or, I could write a script to add a button to the select images to select only group followers.

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Here’s a script that will add a select group followers button. Unzip it the file and drop the lua file in your lua-scripts contrib directory. Start darktable, go to script_manager, look in contrib and start the select_group_followers script.
select_group_followers.zip (1.8 KB)

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The group_leaders and group_followers collection filters were removed in 4.8, since no one could come up with a use case for them. Of course as soon as we do that someone does come up with a use case :rofl:.

Haha, sorry :sweat_smile:.

Here’s a script that will add a select group followers button. Unzip it the file and drop the lua file in your lua-scripts contrib directory. Start darktable, go to script_manager, look in contrib and start the select_group_followers script.

Thanks a lot, amazing! Will test it out later and report back.

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If I am understanding your request right you want to choose between the RAW and JPEG file with out looking at the picture twice. To me, when I used to shoot both, had my lightroom setup thus:

Where by I would see both images side by side and when I float the mouse over an image I didn’t want to type “r” for remove. This tagged the image as rejected. After scrolling through the list to set the filter in the upper right for the rejected files hit ctrl+a to select them all and delete(trash) to clear them out. Never really used grouping.
If I need to expand the image for a closer look then I hit “x” and hit “x” again to return to thumbnails. I set the 4 images across b/c that allows me to see enough details for most images in the initial culling.

I do agree that you could probably save some trouble that shooting in RAW only would save some trouble but trust you have your reasons for the JPEGs.

I only shot RAW+jpg while I was learning raw editing. Once I was familiar with the process, I noticed I rarely used the jpgs, so I stopped saving both in the camera.

On some rare occasions, when I need a result very fast, I may still save camera jpegs. But in most, editing a raw file is fast enough for me, and gives me a better result. As usual, that may be different for others, depending on their personal requirements. Though I think most here do not save both raw and jpg…

Works perfectly, exactly recovering my workflow, thanks a lot!

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Hello everyone :slightly_smiling_face: #

I have exactly the same issue.
I shoot JPG + RAW and sort all photos after the shooting session.
I delete the rejected images completely. But i would like to delete only the raw files of the images i gave 1 star and keep the JPGs.

I thought, i could use your select_group_folowers script, change the group leader and delete them afterwards.
Would it be possible to write a script that directly deletes only the RAW or the JPGs?

Do you rate the jpg 1 star or the raw or both?

The script could be modified to select what you want, but it would take a lot more if statements. Something like

if img.rating == 1 and not img.is_raw and #img.group_members() > 1 then
  for _, gimg in ipairs(img.group_followers()) do
    if gimg.is_raw then
      table.insert(group_followers, gimg)
    end
  end
end