Lighttable shows skulls where there should be a thumbnail

Software darktable
1

I don’t copy photos to a harddrive, I keep them on the original SD cards (I know, I know, but I’ve bought M-discs to back them up to).

I fully understand Darktable showing skulls for photos for which the SD card isn’t present (although it actually caches thumbnails better on my Linux laptop), :man_shrugging: but now I put an old card in and was looking for a specific image and couldn’t find it.

So I began browsing the SD card via Windows Explorer instead and found the photo.

Went back to Darktable and double clicked the skull I knew was supposed to be the photo… and it loaded! And once back to Lighttable the thumbnail showed up.

First, why does it do this? Second, how can I force a refresh of skull icons to proper thumbnails?

I’m using Darktable 5.2.0.

2

SD cards aren’t meant to be long term storage; you should really copy your files to a hard drive.

(1) Darktable checks if the file is there every so often. (2) run darktable-generate-cache from a terminal

1 Like
3

In preferences, there’s a checkbox to remove cached thumbnails to force a refresh. You should really copy to the hard disk, though.

1 Like
4

Thanks, this seems to have worked! I ran it once for very SD card I inserted.

Only issue now is I have to manually clean out the skull icons which are actually missing, probably for when I edited some photos on my laptop, and other photos on my desktop.

5

If the solutions are a handful maybe having the problem is the problem ;-).