Use grouped jpeg for lighttable thumbnail if embedded is to small?

Hello there,

I’m shooting with a Sony a6400 which only stores a “small” embedded JPEG alongside each RAW file (1616*1080). During culling I often want to have a bigger view of images for a quick focus check, but if the thumbnail size exceeds the size of the embedded JPEG, the raw file is used instead (which takes much longer). I shoot RAW+JPEG anyways and it would be much faster to use the grouped JPEG for this thumbnail creation, but that does not happen (as it is not the leader). Would it be possible to have darktable use the bigger grouped JPEG for these cases as long as the RAW has no history stack? Or does somebody have a different approach?

I guess pre-rendering RAW previews would be an option, but I would actually like to look at the JPEGs as they are closer to a final edited picture than the dull unedited RAW. Also I end up rejecting a major part of the images, so pre-rendering seems like a waste of cpu-time if the full size JPEGs are available anyway.

During culling, if I only look at the JPEGs (by filtering for the file extension) the ratings are only applied to the JPEGs, not the entire group. So this is also not an option if I want to e.g. delete all rejects (including the RAWs) after culling just the JPEGs.

Cheers, David

Hi,
Your are not the only one who want this feature. But there’s many problem associated :

  • grouping may be used for other things than raw+jpeg (bracketing, pano, …) and dt has not real way to know for sure if we are in a “raw+jpeg” case or not.
  • that would become a mess if one want to edit the jpeg instead of the raw file (for ultra quick and dirty export, for example)
  • that will make even more prominent the newcomers “surprise” when they enter darkroom and see a quite different rendering.

Now I understand your need, I just say that we have not yet found a good way to solve it.
Maybe we can imagine a “very simple” way to quickly switch the group leader between raw and jpeg : one time for culling, and then another time for editing…
I know there’s a lua script that is doing that. Maybe you should have a try ?

2 Likes