Other editing software allows you to edit files offline (“preview” in Capture One and “smart preview” in Adobe Lightroom). I mean they allow you to edit files that are not physically located in the pc at that moment (export excluded). Can I do the same things in RawTherapee, Darktable or others?
EDIT
I need a photo editor and raw management that allow you to easily switch from a computer to another and to edit a RAW without the original files.
Darktable has a “copy locally” feature that will move the raw file into a local cache. RawTherapee has no such feature.
Right now, until I move disk drives around, on my new machine I’m editing every file remotely, over a NFS share. I do the same sort of thing on my Windows tablet as a matter of course, with a SMB share. Is this the sort of thing you’re thinking of?
NFS: Network File Share, a quite aged unix thing.
SMB: Samba, the linux reverse-engineering effort to emulate the Windows network file sharing protocol
RawTherapee does not have a database for the images. Instead RawTherapee is directly reading the files. This means for you, if the file is not available, you can’t edit it.
No, that’s not what I meant.
Capture One example: when I import a photo, the software creates a copy (“preview”) that allows you to set all parameters without the need for the original RAW files (except if you need to generate the export files). It allows you to move all RAWs to another HDD and work with more than one PC without the need to move the original files each time (only the library)
So with Darktable can I do the same thing?
More or less, yes.
Well, I already tried to explain that RawTherappe has no database (or like you say it: a library)