Open multiple files in RawTherapee from Digikam

Software RawTherapee
1

Hello,

I just registered on this forum and this is my first experience with rawtherapee.
I have no experience in any raw image processing program.
I have read the Getting Started and I am having a problem opening multiple files in RawTherapee from Digikam.
When I do this, it opens as many RawTherapee windows as files.
If after cataloging in Digikam, I decide to develop 20 raw, that’s 20 RawTherapee windows.

I read this post before asking my question:

I just want to sort in digikam the images I want to develop, then batch process them in RawTherapee.
I tried Ctrl_A to select all the images corresponding to the sort, right click-> Open with → RawTherapee, but it may not be the right way.

What is the correct way to go from cataloging in Digikam to developing in RawTherapee?

Thanks in advance

Benoit

2

I guess one by one (as you can’t process 20 photos simultaneously :wink: ).

An off-topic remark: ART is a derivate of RawTherapee (looks quite similar) and in Preferences - Image processing, there is an option to synchronize metadata with xmp sidecar files. I have set that to ‘bidirectional’.

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This way I can rate photos in Digikam with eg. 5 stars, then open ART, navigate to the same photo directory and say: show only photos with a 5 star rating - et voilà, there they are. Then I do Ctrl+a and say via rightclick mouse: Open (Enter does not work here), and the selected photos open each in their own tab (so no x instances of ART that open, just tabs within 1 instance). But as said, this is off-topic because not RT related.

Welcome on the forum by the way!

3

Thanks for the info, ART can see the rating of Digikam, but I can’t get that with Rawtherapee.

However, the documentation indicates that it is possible:

Rating

RawTherapee allows you to rank images between 0 and 5 stars. RawTherapee 5.7 introduced support for reading the rating information stored within the image’s metadata, e.g. as set by your camera or by other software, and showing it through its star rank system.

Metadata tags used for conveying the rating have evolved over the years, and RawTherapee prioritizes them in the following ascending order:

  1. Exif rating
  2. XMP rating
  3. PP3 rank

That is, if an image has an Exif rating tag with value 1 and an embedded XMP rating tag with value 2, then RawTherapee will show 2 stars. If you then rank it 3 stars in RawTherapee, the 3-star rating is shown in RawTherapee’s File Browser and Filmstrip.

Note that RawTherapee’s star ranking does not get exported to saved images. That is, if you saved the image from the above example, the saved file would contain Exif:rating=1 and XMP:rating=2 if you set “metadata copy mode” to “copy unchanged” - it would not reflect the 3-star rank anywhere. Furthermore, if you set “metadata copy mode” to “apply modifications”, the saved file would only contain Exif:rating=1, as editing XMP is unsupported so it gets stripped.

https://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/File_Browser

Is it a file format problem?
RT write its data not in an .xmp file, but in a .pp3 file
Is this configurable in RT?

4

Hello @benoit
I am completely convinced of RawTherapee. With it I create the best images. But if someone is starting from scratch, I think ART might be the better choice. You get there faster to the good result. By fast I don’t mean the speed of the computer in developing, but the speed of the person sitting at the computer, i.e. the selection of settings and filters, or tools.
Also, it is not so good to start Rawtherapee from another program. Better: always start the program directly and from there select the photos and process them.
Besides, as a beginner, it is already very ambitious to want to wrap many images at the same time. Learning to develop must be developed gradually.

5

Hello, as far as I can see star ratings set in Digikam are not read by RawTherapee, and vice versa. In Preferences there’s no option to change this behavior.

6

@benoit
Hello, good news, I saw only this morning that you can star-rate raws in Digikam and those stars will be read by RawTherapee.

For that you must use a pre-dev branch of RT, called exiv2. You can find them on this page. See section Downloads.

Once up and running, go to Preferences - Image processing > Metadata sync with xmp sidecars and choose Read-only or Bidirectional.

7

I tried yesterday but it did not work

8

Are you on Windows, Mac or Linux? The AppImage (for Linux) works well.

9

I’m on stable Debian
I’ll post on this thread, to see what I did wrong

10

I deleted the cache and it works (but not Bidirectional)

% cd .cache/
% rm -fr RawTherapee*

Many thanks for your help

11

There are still some glitches going on, one of them is that changing the star rating in Digikam is not reflected in RT.

And for that bidirectional thing, let’s wait until Hiram reacts, or perhaps @agriggio (who made ART), as far as I know this functionality appeared first in ART.

12

If you delete the cache and reload RT it works…
it’s a glitch
for this appimage the cache directory is
RawTherapee5-5889merge-AppImage/

13

Thanks, but this rating thing is not my “core business”, I was just checking out how that works in RT, it’s very new. Glitches will be gone after some time, normally.