I have been playing around with with darktable 3.5.0+1451~gc4212703e and trying to re-learn darktable a bit more in detail (got some time in hand and wanted to see/learn alternatives to RT). I was trying to load few play-raw files from here and load multiple edits. I save them as <basename>_nn.<extension>.xmp as suggested in help. However, each duplicate kind of deletes all history and starts from scratch. I then have to load each side car into each duplicate manually. Any suggestions please?
Load a sidecar, then go into the duplicate manager and.copy it. Then import the next side car, and it should only change one.
I thought when you have multiple sidecar files as <basename>_nn.<extension>.xmp, it will automatically pick those up during import (or am I mistaken?). Otherwise, this would be a lot of additional work to move DT edits from one computer to other.
Yes, that is correct. If you are generating those files, though, make sure the timestamp (in the metadata) is unique. Then they’ll show up in the duplicate manager with the nn as the version number.
Also, make sure you close DT and reopen it, then reimport the files. There’s a setting to check for reloading the sidecar files on open, otherwise it just uses whats in the database.
I did check the option of checking updated xmp.
When I import with multiple sidecar files, I generally get this:
[exif] dt_exif_xmp_read for <filename>, id 35 found auto_presets_applied but there was no history and the new file gets loaded with just defaults.