I’ve done that more than 3 years ago. For this I have done:
while editing my Lr picture I’ve been using dt for some of them. this was to learn how dt works and don’t be too “lost” when switching.
then I’ve created a Lr → dt module (integrated in dt) to recover some data (all keywords and some edits like crop, curve,…), see Importing Lightroom Development | darktable
Don’t be too expecting of the auto-import from Lr, it is not perfect but I found that it saves me 80% of the work on each image I have needed to recover in darktable. that’s is when I need to print or export an old picture the conversion save me quite some time.
At the start I think I’ve been editing 20% slower, with the time I think I’m now editing in darktable at the same speed I’ve used to do in Lightroom as the tool has progressed a lot and some editing not possible in Lightroom are now possible in darktable.
All in all I would never ever go back to the lock-in Adobe policy.
Don’t get it wrong. Diffetent does not mean bad. Darktable is my primary RAW developing software. I did try Lightroom but I found that 1+ Gb monster too heavy and too resource hungry for what I need. Plus it is so proprietary (you don’t really own your work) plus it is $100+ / year license fee which does not make sense for my purpose (managing family pictures archive).
Sure, nothing special. Just import the picture where the .xmp from Lightroom exists and it will import whatever in this .xmp. Note that this only happens the first time, that is when there is no .xmp from darktable.
A Lr xmp is named “.xmp” a darktable xmp is named “..xmp”.
Thanks!
Yeah this is basically what I’m planning. As well, I’ll try to preserve my existing collections via tagging and make archives of any keep photos.
Hi Pascal, I’ve tried to import LR nef images + xmp and I’m progressing (tags and basic treatements are ok). I still have an issue with the dt “metadata” like title, description, creator(, publisher) and rights while for jpg images these attributes are imported properly.
Are these data normally considered in your LR import module ?
Is there any tip or anything I should look at ?
Hi Tobias,
I’ve forked master dt and started a new branch LR Import add metadata and modified the file lightroom.c.
I’m unsure of what I did (I’m not a C programmer) and I’m not able to build and test.
But the changes are straight forward and I think this could be not too long to review for somebody who knows.
Is the next step to make a new pull request ?
Thanks
I’m not familiar with the git process (pull request, …) and I don’t want to make a mistake.
But I guess the best way is to make a pull request and let people check and accept or not the proposal of change. Is that correct ?
Hi Pascal,
For lr import I see two missing functions:
Get treatments from jpg & tif xmp data
Retrieve virtual copies (virtual copies are not in xmp data but snapshot data are. So making a snapshot of virtual copies would give access to them)
Is there already any plan to do this ?
Is the dt routine to retrieve xmp data from xmp file the same as to retrieve embedded xmp data in jpg file ?
From your standpoint how you would do that ? Any advice ?
Thanks
I think I have found the answer for this.
If jpg and tif files have an xmp sidecar file with development data, dt imports them as well ! Very, very well done !
To build these xmp files, the following command does the job: exiftool -ext jpg -ext tif -overwrite_original -tagsfromfile @ -all:all -srcfile %d%f.xmp -r DIR
with DIR = images’ root folder.