I have just been emptying my SD cards in preparation for a overseas vacation next week. I have found darktable really useful at organizing my still images into folders based on date, but any movies I shot with my cameras were ignored. I appreciate that darktable is not for video editing, but I wonder if others would like the copy and import feature to copy videos as well as still images or is it just me?
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rapid photo downloader.
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I guess I am trying to limit the number of programs on my computer. Over the years my computers get overloaded with programs. Currently I will stick to the copy and paste function for videos from my SD card, but I thought it might be a improvement on darktable’s DAM capabilities if it could copy the video files as so many digital cameras are now used for both still and video. But I don’t want to detract from darktable’s main function of editing raw files and I don’t understand the coding implications.
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I also like to limit the apps on my machines, but in general I stick to the old unix principle:
“Do one thing and do it well.”
Darktable is not an image ingester, although some think otherwise because somehow that “copy & import” button exists. In my opinion it should be removed.
But the real question is:
Darktable does not edit videos, so why should it ever copy them around?
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I find it a great button. Originally I only looked at darktable as a raw editor, but then the DAM capabilities improved and I went hey yes this is great. There is no value in removing it as we can just ignore it if we don’t like it. The question I am asking is if it can be made more useful with little effort. Thanks for your feedback.
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It can not.
Sorry, for the bluntness but there is no other way to say it.
Darktable does not import, display or edit movies.
So that button would simply lie to the user.
Do you want darktable to lie to you?
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If you want a program with DAM functions for images and videos, try Digikam. While I don’t like its image editor, I prefer it over darktable for metadata handling. It allows import of videos, modification of (some) video metadata and it can play at least the common formats.
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Bluntness is fine. I just asked people for honest opinions. All good.
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Yes I did try digikam and it just feels like just another program to clutter my computer. Copy and paste works fine for me if that is what I must do. I was just throwing it out there for open discussion if the ability to copy and import movie files was regarded as a good thing for darktable. I take no offence if I am alone on this thought. As I previously said I never looked at darktable for its DAM capabilities, but it has either improved or I have become more aware of darktable’s DAM capabilities. Also most cameras do still and movie images so maybe not that a big a stretch. Thanks for reading and responding.
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Hello Terry,
RPD takes few room on your computer and does very well what it has been created for : transfer + backup photos and videos. A very powerful lightweight. Try it, and you cannot leave it anymore. 
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Thanks for your reply. I have setup darktable to copy and import my photos from SD cards into dated folders. It works really nice for my needs. It was not this feature that attracted me to darktable, but since the DAM capability is there I will use it and appreciate it. It was one of the functions I had previously used Adobe’s Lightroom for and so it was a pleasant surprise when I discovered something similar in darktable. Lightroom would import movie images as well despite not being able to edit them. Since digital cameras shot both still and movies I would like to also place my holiday videos in the same dated folders. For now the copy and paste function will have to do for me.
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Hello Terry,
Sorry, I missed your reply. 
I see why I didn’t get notified : I forgot to switch to Watching.
OK, so if you need to import videos together with photos, then RPD is definately what you need.
I don’t use the videos import but it is there and works the same ways as the photos import.
You can select the naming scheme or build one, if files will be backed up to another media while being transfered, etc.
The file manager (whatever OS you use) is always there. I don’t even get the point over RPD, but then I import new files every few weeks, so probably I’d appreciate the automation if I needed to do that more often (though, as I see it, it’d probably put together some silly script). As it stands, I just use the file manager, and have a tiny script to rename files based on EXIF data:
exiv2 -r'%F_%H-%M-%S_:basename:' *
And if I forget to do that, and start processing them in darktable, I have another that renames the sidecars as well (I’m not even sure any more if it handles multiple sidecars, as I rarely use it):
for i in *NEF *RW2 *JPG *jpg ; do echo $i `exiv2 -g Exif.Photo.DateTimeDigitized $i 2>/dev/null` ; done | grep DateTimeDigitized |gawk '{print "mv", $1, $5 "-" $6 "_" $1, "; mv", $1 ".xmp", $5 "-" $6 "_" $1 ".xmp"}'|sed 's/:/-/g'|bash
Thanks for the replies. I can still see value to me if DT could import the video files. I will just have to copy and paste at this stage. I guess I should at least look at RPD and see if it suits my needs.
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I use copy and import and would like to import video files also from my card via darktable. Right now I import raw files in darktable and then need to open the file manager and find the video files there.
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@Terry @Peter same use case here.
Import and basic DAM in DT meets most of my needs. An option to include copying videos files on import would make it even better…
Yes other programs can do and probably even better, just prefer the DT only approach.
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@Camino1970 welcome to the forum. I may make a feature request and see if any of the developers are interested in this improvement to the DAM capabilities of DT.
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