Lost all my XMP files. Recover from JPGs?

Software darktable
1

For a while, I was using the Git version of Darktable for editing, but for a variety of reasons, have recently switched back to the stable version.

Of course, my configuration was incompatible, and had to be scrapped (backed up and deleted .config/darktable).

But to my great dismay, the first import of my image archive overwrote all existing XMP files and deleted all edits. Is that intentional?

But if I remember correctly, Darktable also writes its XMP data into the exported JPGs, right? So how do I copy that data back into usable XMP files?

2

For single images, you can use the “load sidecar file” button in lighttable and just select the jpg file (you will need to disable the *.xmp filter in the file dialog for that).

For batch processing, exiv2 can extract the xmp file from the jpg:

exiv2 -e X filename.jpg

After renaming the output file from filename.xmp to filename.cr2.xmp, darktable correctly loaded the history from this xmp file.

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