Searching in Lighttable by filename?

Software darktable
1

I have many large collections of bird photos, and quite often I want to reprocess an old image. For example, new options in DT may allow me to improve an old image, or I have a very poor quality bird photo that is hard to identify, and I want to go back and redo the image in the hope of recognising details missed the first time round.

In these cases, there won’t be any useful tags or ratings, but I know the filename eg ER6_9213.CR3.

Is there any easy way for Lighttable to go straight to the image? or to filter on the filename?

2

left sidebar: Collections => filename might work?

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3

@rvietor’s suggestion does work and it also works with partial names and/or specified patterns.

Read all about all the in-and-outs in the darktable doc: collections

EDIT: Forgot to mention: When you start typing a filename in the search/filter box the found matches are shown in the collections module. However: If you use wildcards this is not the case and you need to press enter before they show up in lightroom view (that is assuming there are any hits)

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4

Many thanks - I vaguely remember looking at this 5 years ago, but never thought to look in the collections tab.

Maybe a more suggestive name for this tab?

Collections filtering?

5

Not sure that is needed, to be honest. Collection means a filtered set of things, which is exactly what this module is for and does.

Its function is also very nicely defined in the first paragraph in the darktable doc:

Filter the images shown in the lighttable view and filmstrip panel using image attributes. This set of filtered images is known as a collection.

But then again, I’m not a developer and this is just my 2c. If you have (a) good reason(s) why its name needs to change and/or something needs to be clarified then you might want to open a request for doing so on GitHub.

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6

Anyway, what you suggest is actually work in progress.

So no need to open an issue on Github.

7

The manual entry is great, but unfortunately I took collection to mean just " a set of things" rather than something filtered.

Anyway it all sounds like the old interface debate about Nouns/Objects vs Verbs/Actions:

Do you guide the user by first letting them choose the object they want to work on, and then offering them a choice of actions on the chosen object.

Or do you start with a list of actions, then let them choose which object is acted on.