How to deal with 1 time use?

Software darktable
1

DT 4.6.1

I’m doing events (between 300 and 800 images) and I’m starting to run out of nvme drive space.

The directory structure I use is: ~/events/custname-yyyymmdd

Either that night or the next day I process the photos and email them to the customer and I’m done.

So now, I tar/zip the whole directory and store it on 2 large external drives. (Officially I only keep them for 1 year, actually it’s over 7 years but I do not guarantee that)

The problem with DT is that now, I have thousands of “skulls and bones”.

  1. What’s a good way of getting rid of them and cleanup the DT db?
  2. Is there a better way of dealing with these 1 time use and discard/archive?

Thanks

2

There’s a shell script for this:

https://docs.darktable.org/usermanual/4.6/en/special-topics/program-invocation/purge_non_existing_images_sh/

Maybe have a look into git annex. There’s even a darktable integration

2 Likes
3

Thanks, I completely forgot about it. I used it plenty of times in the times DT2.x

4

Do you need to keep those event images in the database between dt sessions? If you edit all the images in one session, you could perhaps use --library :memory:, which discards the library at the end of the run.

I think you can even do that when you have “long term images” in parallel (but those won’t be accessible from the “disk library” when you use :memory:, of course).

1 Like
5

I just did a test on DT. I found a folder with a mix of images and skulls and bones. In lighttable I selected all and used the remove option to remove them and subsequently the now empty folder from the DT database. This option doesn’t delete them from the harddrive so it is very safe. The trash option works the same but removes images from the harddrive so is riskier if you make a mistake.