geeqie->darktable->gimp workflow

My workflow has been to peruse raws with geeqie and then to spawn Rawtherapee, tweak the raw and then to send the resulting tif to Gimp for final touches. With RawTherapee I can adjust the same raw image N-times and then send N-tifs off to Gimp, where I get to choose the one I like best, or perhaps to mask parts of one and blend it onto another.

After editing .config/geeqie/applications/appimagekit-gimp.desktop so the mime types definition includes image/x-nikon-nef I can now spawn Gimp directly from geeqie, on a raw image. Gimp then spawns Darktable. So far so good.

But the only way I can find to get back to Gimp, from DarkTable, is to kill the Darktable window. Which makes it impossible to send 2, 3 or 4 versions of the same raw to Gimp (from Darktable), as I can do with RawTherapee. I could manually export N-versions to ./darktable_exported and then manually open Gimp and manually navigate to that directory and then click the mouse a few times. Automatic export of multiple image versions, directly to Gimp, would be nice if it was possible.

Am I missing something? Or are manual exports and manual gimp loading my only Darktable option?

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Ouch. I wish it was possible to delete a post that has no responses.

Ten seconds after I made the above it occurred to me to use geeqie to spawn Darktable multiple times, on the same raw. Each successive instance of Darktable sends its tif output to the same, still-running instance of Gimp. So my problem is now solved.

I can start with geeqie and send the same raw to Gimp as multiple slightly different versions, with Darktable as an intermediate step. Which is what I wanted.

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No need to delete, as you’ve answered and someone else may find this useful! Thanks for sharing.

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