Before switching to darktable, I used other digital asset management software and these offered me to rename photos as well.
I read in another post here in this forums that dt would lose the links to the photos upon renaming, so ideally we’d to have to rename photos on export.
Bash shell scripts allow to move and rename files in one step, I don’t know how lua does it but I’m sure lua is capable to do the same
I was looking for a lua script able to rename photos on export, but didn’t find any. Probably this kind of script doesn’t exist yet.
Good point, I did it a lot of coding but recently I’m very happy to get ui buttons to click, so if I could find a script helping in this process, this would be great
Dt needs to know where to read and where to write files, so dt needs to know where files are.
I guess you refer to other, but to rename photos dt shall have no problems
Basically dt would have to re-read / update file paths to read renamed files, to display them again in lighttable
I still don’t understand. Are you referring to renaming the RAW files or the exported files?
If it’s the RAW files, yes, it’s complicated to rename them once they’ve been imported. Ideally you should give them a unique ‘final’ name before importing them into the database (note though that there are ways to deal with externally moved files if they’ve not been renamed).
If it’s the exported files, the export module has a pretty complete way of renaming them based both in the RAW name and other data.
Sorry, this wasn’t intentional.
I started this topic with a plugin / script idea in mind because it’s the easiest way to rename files.
Personally I’d love to rename photos (raw) inside dt’s light table
Renaming isn’t that complicated but dt had to update the path to the file reference, else we get a rather unspectacular collection of space invaders skulls… Facepalm…
To be honest, I never liked the file management metaphor of any Os.
Digital asset management should be in one place, and the HD or ssd only a place to store but not to manage files in the way default file managers handle file structure.
It’s time wasting both to organize and to retrieve files, breaking workflow and taking away our focus on what’s really important
Maybe is Renaming indeed useless, but default machine names the ones our cameras give by default, are equally useless, I mean, we get no hint what film roll we’re dealing with
Renaming with tags needs extra buttons whereas names are immediately visible.
What I do is to structure photo names with meaningful tags like Category - Title - daytime.filesuffix
Or if you’re lazy like me, use directory names that are rich in keywords so they can serve as poor man’s tags. As far as file names are concerned, all I care about is that they are unique, they show at a glance when the photo was taken, and the name of the raw file and the output file(s) correlate.