How to filter for a month?

Software darktable
1

I would like to filter my images for a month of any year.

For example all the pictures from february of all the photos I have ever taken.

2

I don’t think this is possible.

3

If a lua plugin can exist to select by geotagging status, then I imagine one could be constructed to select by $EXIF_MONTH. The selected images can then be tagged or given a combination of colour tags. Repeat for each of 12 months. Whether the effort is worthwhile is another matter. Also, the process would need to be repeated for new imports.

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4

Export the metadata into a text file (using e.g. EXIFtoolGUI), import this into an EXCEL-spreadsheet and filter for “MONTH”. That’s it.

Here is an example from my image archiving EXCEL-sheet:

image
image1721×293 24.1 KB

Extracting the month from the date info and select the table accordingly should be easy.

Hermann-Josef

5

Seriously !!! We are in a darktable forum I suppose that the solution was meant to be in darktable, no?

6

I actually like it when solutions are offered outside the box. There could be things that fit into my worklow and that I would therefore be happy to adopt. The most important thing is that I get the work done efficiently - I don’t care which program I use.

Thank you very much to the people who pointed out possible solutions - I really appreciate it!

1 Like
7

I guess that would depend on what the reason for the filtering is.

If you want to work with the retained images in darktable in a way that’s even marginally comfortable, yes, I’d want the filtering done in darktable. Looking for a file within darktable based on an external list is defiinitely not comfortable


If all you need is a list of images taken in a certain month, an external solution would work as well (e.g. with an SQLIte query of the database and some filtering of that output
). Rereading all image files might be a bit overkill

I can actually see uses for such a selection of filenames (rather niche uses, though)

8

Digikam is your friend, and you can even open an image in Darktable from Digikam.

Capture d’écran du 2025-02-05 10-37-30
Capture d’écran du 2025-02-05 10-37-30328×1115 42.6 KB

9

Which doesn’t answer OP question!

10

that combination year+month is also possible in darktable - but not just a month

11

I organize my photos using tags, with each photo assigned a tag corresponding to the month it was taken.

When I started using this system a few years ago, it was the best solution to the problem I could come up with.

My tagging format follows the pattern: MONTH|01 Jan, MONTH|02 Feb, MONTH|03 March, and so on.

As I write this, I realize that adding a quarter prefix, such as MONTH|Q1|01 Jan, would allow for filtering by both month and quarter.

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13

Could this tagging be automated on import?

14

Another possibility would be date filters. Sqlite supports the strftime function, so it would be possible to add filters for any part of the date. The different fields are listed here: Date And Time Functions
So, it would be possible to piece together a filter like “month is between January and March, the day of week is Saturday, time of day is between 21:03 and 23:31”, if someone really wanted that.

15

I don’t know, but there is probably some way to do it with a Lua script.

I usually tag all imported photos with inbox tags like MONTH|0. Later when I have more time, I filter for MONTH|0 and tag the photos with the correct month tag.

I do the same with a tag for PLACE, so all imported photos begin with the tags MONTH|0 and PLACE|0.

16

I‘d like to see that integrated into the collections module. Might be worth a feature request.

17

Well, we are in a forum for free software! EXIFtool is free software. And if you do not use EXCEL just replace it by the OpenOffice equivalent


Hermann-Josef

19

You could at least read my whole message or quote it properly, the following in the sentence you quoted is:


I suppose that the solution was meant to be in darktable, no?

20

To be fair to @Pascal_Obry, though the site as a whole is pixls.us, this was posted in the channel with tags “software” and “darktable”

21

Here is a script that will select all images taken in February. Exit darktable before, then:

echo 'delete from selected_images; insert into selected_images (imgid) select id from images where strftime("%m", datetime(datetime_taken/1000000 + unixepoch("0001-01-01 00:00:00"), "unixepoch")) = "02"' | sqlite3 ~/.config/darktable/library.db

This will mark all images taken in February as selected. Start darktable, those images are selected so you can just assigned them a tag if needed (at least temporarily to create a corresponding selection).

Hope this helps !

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