Importing in Windows - Catalog now a mess

Software darktable
1

FIlm rolls are a total mess and folders does does not find find a folder that an import just deposited the pictures to. It seems dt cannot make up its mind if my machine is windows or Linux. some film rolls look like: “D:\Users\etc…” Some like “D:/Users/etc…” Some “YYYY\YYYY-MM-DD/ect…” Some imports are completely missing but have the xmp’s still intact.

So what database is the catalog using so I can manually go in and clean it up.
Second this all related to the windows uses \ and linux uses / and DT requiring / on a windows system…

So should I kill the catalogs and simply import the the entire master folder?

2

darktable doesn‘t import stuff into a place under darktables control but points to the location on the file system - and the description of a path differs between linux and windows.
So if you share the same library.db (in your ~/.config/darktable directory) between windows and linux it’s up to you to update the file location (maybe directly in the library.db) if you switch the os.
But you can file a geature request with a precise description what and how darktable should do this for you: https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/issues/new?assignees=&labels=&template=feature_request.md&title=

3

Actually with version 3.6 DT does now import to a specific location as well as look into existing folders… The issue is getting film rolls to access pictures based on consistent algorithms. So to achieve some consistency I have renamed the library.db to oldlibraryold.dbold and I am import-add-to-library varying the top folder and seeing which one will allow me to filter based on the folder selection. It is more work than I should have to go through but at least I will find out which / or \ or // DT is happy with under all circumstances… Thank you for your time in responding.

Thank you for the link as I did leave an issue ticket.

4

The development team goes through a lot to support windows.

With open source you’re not a user, you’re a participant. The software is only as good as its testers.

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5

I know better please accept m apologies for the poorly written and ungrateful sounding response. I know better and I would love to turn back time on that response.
The time spent creating a couple of library.db’s and testing them out has got to be puny compared to the creation work required - I am so sorry

6

I gave screenshot examples in my issues report and it got me thinking that two different API’s or code sets are being used for copy and import and the import “sub-modules”…

7

Thank you for your understanding! Your slip of tounge was very slight, thank you for bringing up the issue.

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The are working on it as the gtk_file_chooser_native for selecting folders the previously used gtk_file_chooser handles Windows UNC differently. Bottom line is they are aware and working on it.

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