Lightroom to Darktable with lot's of dng files

Software darktable
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I’m going to move from LR to darktable like many others but I have lot’s of dng files that darktable doesn’t support.
I know that there is converter for those files but what is the best workflow to move many thousands of photos from LR to darktable with those dng files?
Is there easy way to export just those and convert and then import or what would be the smartest way to do it still keeping keywords and so on?

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Could you elaborate on what exactly these dng files are that darktable does not import?
And welcome to the forum!

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Thank you and good question. They show as big question mark on my darktable catalog.
I think that they are adobe dng or something like that. I have photos taken with Canon DSLR and iPhone on my LR catalog and if I remember right when I did my test import it said something about adobe dng files.

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Welcome!

Adobe Lightroom (or Camera Raw) probably converts these to the latest DNG version 1.7 (JPEG XL compressed), which is indeed not yet supported by dt (as the release notes and the camera support page clearly state). If possible, one should choose a lower DNG version level, such as 1.6 or 1.4.

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Btw, if your Canon raws are not from the most recent R1 or R5m2, you should be able to import them directly, without any need to convert to DNG. Don’t know how you would keep the labels then though…

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Have lightroom write xmp files. Keywords should be imported.

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Yep that’s what I have been doing with all other photos but not sure with those dng files

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I did a test now and tried to import photo which was taken with my iPhone 15 Pro Max and I can preview it with MacOS but when I try to import it to darktable it says not supported and just show big question mark and can’t open it. So example with those files I have to do something different.
I think that there was other dng files too which I need to convert but I don’t know which is the best/easiest smartest way.

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The same camera support page also clearly says iPhone raws are not currently supported.

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Yep I know. That’s why I was asking what would be te best/easiest/smartest workflow thing to do to get those photos to darkroom catalog. If I need to use converter which is the best way to use it to keep most of the metadata (at least keywords).
I have been thinking of doing smart catalog on LR and then export those to folder and then convert all of those before importing to darkroom but does that keep the metadata and is there better way to do it?

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@paperdigits advice still stands.

You could export those dngs from lightroom as e.g TIFF or PNG. Draktable can read those, and you’ll have the edited versions. Metadata should be written on export, but test the procedure on a small selection first (and keep a backup of the original dng files).

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I think that in lr, you can set up for it to write the metadata to the dng (for the iPhone raw) but force the dng version to the earlier one. On import, dt should read the metadata. Test it on one image.