I have the following behaviour, which I find a bit awkward.
I have imported a folder ‘BackupMobilPhone’ with the pictures from my mobile phone into Darktable. Now I want to move the pictures that I have selected in Lighttable to other folders via the ‘Action on Selection’ → ‘Move’ menu, e.g. ‘2024 Grandma’s birthday’.
This also works well.
However, Lighttable also jumps into the collection to which I move the images. In other words, under ‘Collections’ → ‘filmrolls’.
Can I tell Darktable not to do this? I want to move more pictures from my backup folder from my mobile phone without having to switch back to the folder every time after a move.
Can’t help thinking that it is the wrong tool for the job. Your file manager is ideal for this kind of work. True, you then have multiple folders to import into darktable, but I’d still choose that method. Sort out first, import second.
Ok. I could simply solve the example with grandma’s birthday using the date and move the pictures.
How does it look now if I want to sort the pictures by content and not by date? For example, because I photographed a recipe from a book when we were at a friend’s house.
Now I have lots of pictures from that day. But only one is the recipe from the book. Would I then have to view and sort all the pictures outside of Darktabel?
How would you go about it? Which tool would be better here?
Its funny the way it works now actually works perfectly for me for this reason. I edit photos in batches from my common import location (subfolder in Pictures) and then I move them to the desired named folder of date and event again in “Pictures”… I will often revist these files with Rawtherapee Art or at times ON1. So my “organized” raw images in their folders also have various sidecars and potentially duplicates etc…This is not ideal for viewing/review outside of darktable later so after I move the files I export them with this string…
THis gives me a mirrored folder structure for my photos from the main “Pictures” folder with just the exported jpg files and with DT appended to the name so I can recognize them also at any time as edited…
So now viewing from PhotoEdits on my phone or other means like casting to my tv this folder is clean and just has the exported images…its a sort of backup as well…
So for review or sharing I use the files in “PhotoEdits”
So the move function, moving to the new collection/folder with all the files selected is the perfect action for me as I just export with my preset, it will export the selected files to a folder with the same name but as a subfolder of “PhotoEdits” then I click to go back to my import directory…
For me the current system works very well. I also use the copy feature a lot, which leaves the original image alone but places a copy of that image in another folder. The new folder opens up and then I can change the name of the image if I want to. This workflow is excellent for my needs. Also, having the new folder (collection) open up lets me confirm the move or copy has been successful.
I am on a windows computer and holding down the Ctrl key I can randomly select multiple images to be moved or copied at the same time. I believe on a Mac you hold down the cmd key to do this selection. This would let you find all the images you want to move to a new folder and do it as a bulk operation.
