help using geotag with darktable 3.6

Software darktable
1

Hi everyone,

I used the geotag module all the time with earlier versions of darktable, but I can’t for the life of me figure out how to get the module in 3.6.1.6 to work. It’s been redesigned. If it matters, I’m on a Mac (MacOS 10.6). I’ve read the darktable help, but remain bamboozled.

In the old module, in lightable, I’d select all the images from my day, click the “apply GPX track file” button, browse to my GPX file, tell darktable my timezone, and voila. All done, and easy. Now, well, I’m not sure.

If I’m reading it right, the help says to find the first image in the set with a reliable time, tap the “apply date/time” button, then “Press the lock button to lock the calculated offset in the module.” (after many minutes of confusion, I noticed a small light grey lock icon on the dark grey background, but it doesn’t do anything for me), then “Select all of the images you wish to adjust and click apply offset to apply the calculated offset to those images”. That last step doesn’t work because no matter what I do the apply offset button remains greyed out, probably because the lock button also doesn’t work for me.

I can geotag one image at a time if I select an image, and tap the “apply date/time” button, then use “apply GPX track file”. I can’t figure out how to get darktable to do this for a set of images from a trip.

I can’t tell if this is a Mac bug or I’m doing it wrong. Has anyone got this working?

I’m about to head off to Terminal and do it with exiftool instead.

Thanks for your time if you’ve read this far.

Here’s a screenshot of what the module looks like for me. Most of the options remain greyed out.
Screen Shot 2021-10-24 at 4.33.19 PM

2

Hmm. Contrary to my confusion last week, I just tried it again and now it works! Odd. I just ignore all of the “apply date/time” options and jump straight to “apply GPX track file…” and it’s working.

Shrug.

(It’s possible that when I first tried it was being thrown by the first few images being outside of the range of the GPX file.)

3

That’s how it’s supposed to work.

The “apply offset” option is there, if you have a certain offset between the clock in your camera and the GPS time stamps recorded in the GPX track. The idea is to take a photograph of your GPS tracker screen showing the GPS time at the beginning of a track recording. The offset between the time shown in that photograph and the time recorded in the metadata is the offset to input and apply.

2 Likes