How to avoid a major screw-up?

Software darktable
1

DT 4.0.1 on debian

I have quite a few “bad/wrong” keywords that came from lightroom when I was still using windows, years ago. Some are lightroom-dngs and some are lightroom.xmps.

I want to cleanup the mess.

I want to cleanup my mess by using exiftool. By wiping the IPTC:keywords, the XMP:Subject, and the XMP:HierarchicalSubject and then re-entering them with exiftool.

How do I make sure that I don’t mess the darktable-xmp-edits? Because I will need to re-read the xmps in darktable.

Any suggestion (I already have 2 separate backups)

Thanks

2

Your darktable xmps are filename.ext.xmp while the light room xmps are just filename.xmp. so you can separate them that way.

3

I should have been more detailed:

The lighroom filename.xmp represent 95%, there are also some filename.cr2.xmp that I want to change the keywords.

Thanks

4

Exiftool will not touch other fields, so DT edits will survive the process, but you should have a backup of course.

If I remember correctly, DT will look for file.cr2.xmp on import. If it doesn’t exist, it will look for file.xmp and import tags etc from there. But DT will always write to file.cr2.xmp afterwards. So you will have some images, where you end up with both versions

You could maybe batch rename all files before or better tell exiftool to save changes to file.cr2.xmp.

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