Linux applications and their non-standard XMP sidecar naming convention

[damonlynch]

@houz

May I ask why RPD cares about sidecar files? If it’s just in the business of copying images from camera/card to the computer, does it need to understand the concept of sidecar files? Are there cameras that create such XMP files themselves?

For two reasons:

1. They are sometimes created by the “camera” (loosely defined). For example at least one Android application used by a Rapid Photo Downloader user creates them.
2. The code to handle it was trivial, because I already had to handle the use case of audio files and THM files, which work identically.

For those who are wondering why I don’t just create the code to handle the darktable / Digicam way of handling XMP sidecars, the answer is pretty simple: it takes longer than you might guess to implement. I have a long TODO list of things of stuff to code and not enough time to implement them. Handling deviations from the spec takes time now and in the future, because I need to monitor changes to XMP handling that projects will implement in future. For instance Geeqie handles XMP differently again from darktable and Digicam. I don’t know what it’s approach will be a few years from now. A GUI is needed to expose these various options to the user, making the application more complex.