Running RT 5.8 and 5.9 Dev concurrently

Software RawTherapee
1

What is the best way to run both RT 5.8 (stable) and RT 5.9 (dev) on the same Win10 at the same time? I’ve got 5.8 configured the way I’d like it to be, but I’d also like to start looking at the Dev version to get ready for future upgrade when it is officially released. Thanks in advance.

2

You might want to have a look here: File Paths.

I make use of the mentioned RT_SETTINGS and RT_CACHE settings to separate the 3 RawTherapee version I’m running/testing. This takes care of running the correct version, configuration and using the correct cache.

I’m on Linux and created functions (could be a small script) that sets these and kicks of the correct RawTherapee version. Not sure how you do that in Windows, but something similar should be possible, I’m sure.

You do need to be careful when loading RAWs, though. RawTherapee overwrites the sidecars and older versions (5.8) will not copy the newer parts from 5.9.

So I also have a Development directory tree and a Stable directory tree that holds my RAWs.

Just in case you can roughly copy what I did in Windows, this is what one of the three functions looks like:

# -------------------------------------------------------- #
# run rawtherapee: Latest development version (local)
function rtd () {
  export RT_SETTINGS="/home/jade/.config/rt.dvlp"
  export RT_CACHE="/home/jade/.cache/rt.dvlp"
  export TMPDIR="/data/General/Swap/Jd.RawTherapee"
  /home/jade/.local/rt.dvlp/rawtherapee "$@"
  unset TMPDIR RT_SETTINGS RT_CACHE
}

I have the development version installed in /home/jade/.local/rt.dvlp/. and rtd starts RawTherapee in this case.