How Do I Open Shared .XMP Edits in Darktable?

[Kland]

Hey there,

I’ve recently been having fun uploading photos to the play_raw tag and you guys have been submitting some awesome edits. I’d like to view these edits in darktable but I’m unsure how to pull them up after being given the .xmp file. Any videos or explanations out there?

Thanks!

[Donatzsky (Nis Donatzsky)]

Set mode to overwrite and then load sidecar file. I recommend creating a duplicate first.

[wpferguson (Bill Ferguson)]

Or put them in a directory and use the script from the How to Play Raw with others topic

[darix]

How to "Play Raw" with others

I’ve played a bit with other Play Raw images on my own, but never tried using someone else’s xmp before. Just swapping the file itself outside of dt (with dt running) initially did nothing. If I closed/opened dt again, then I would get a database notice to use the newer xmp. But sometimes still no change in the darkroom. I found that by removing the image from the library, doing the xmp swap, and then re-importing seemed to work. But one poster’s version locks dt in a processing mode for for…

[kofa (István Kovács)]

According to the manual, no need to set the mode to overwrite: that’s only for pasting.

mode
This setting defines how the paste actions behave

The application of a sidecar file always overwrites the history:

load sidecar file
Open a dialog box which allows you to import the history stack from a selected XMP file. The imported history stack is used to completely replace the current history stack(s) of the selected image(s). Caution: this operation can not be undone!

(darktable user manual - history stack)

[kofa (István Kovács)]

What makes this a bit hard to remember is that other history-related write operations (pasting, and also applying styles) do have a mode setting; loading a sidecar is the exception.