After a shoot, I use the colour, star, and tag metadata to sort photos. I then edit in either lightroom or darktable, depending on the photo (they both have their strengths for different things). Is it at all possible to sync the star ratings etc both ways?
I know darktable imports that stuff from lightroom on first import, that’s a start but not quite what i’m looking for.
I get the feeling this might be possible with a darktable lua script?
It should be possible to do through XMP files.
Not sure how it would work on the LR side, but in DT set it to write XMPs on edit and to look for changes on start up.
It likely involves changing the xmp naming scheme (dt approach) so LR could read the tags. I’m not sure if it is worth the trouble.
Ah yes, forgot about the different naming scheme.
Color labels are not standard metadata so you’d need a script to sync between the two apps.
Seems like an exercise in futility to be honest.
You forgot to tell us which program is the starting point, lightroom or darktable. Nor did you tell us which should be used for searching the image collection.
You may not need a full two-way syncing. Keep in mind that editing operations cannot be transferred either way (with a few exceptions where dt can use the lr operation). So to get the result of your editing in the other program, you will have to export the edits to TIFF, PNG, JPG. And those formats can carry metadata, which can be safely modified.
That still leaves a few potential issues:
But all that is easy to check on a small sample. The difficult part is syncing for raw files, and that is probably more trouble than it’s worth (unless there are more things you haven’t mentioned).
such scripts can be generated using claude.ai or other generative AI Tools quite easily. Maybe you just need to give them samples the naming scheme (but even without sampels the result is useful) - and resulting python scripts are quite good.
e.g. “please generate a python script that takes metadata tags from a darktable sidecar xmp and converts them into an adobe lightroom sidecar xmp. keep in mind the darktable specific encoding of color labels. please don't map adjustments.”