Windows 11 Gimp 2.10.36 and darktable 4.8 not working

Hi
I’ve just built a Windows 11 PC.
I’m trying to get my workflow for Olympus raw file ( ORF) working.
I’ve installed both the above softwares.
But, when I drop an ORF in Gimp it says:

There is no RAW loader installed to open ‘Raw Olympus ORF’ files.

GIMP currently supports these RAW loaders:
- darktable (http://www.darktable.org/), at least 1.7
- RawTherapee (http://rawtherapee.com/), at least 5.2

Please install one of them in order to load RAW files.
When I check Gimp Preferences, Image Import & Export, Raw Image Importer only has the file-raw-placeholder showing…

Please help

Thanks
Pat

I think I’ll stick with windows 7 …

Why not develop your photos directly in darktable, and then invoke Gimp via Lua if really needed? Darktable has so powerful editing capabilities that I have not used Gimp to edit photos for years.

https://darktable-org.github.io/luadocs/lua.scripts.manual/scripts/contrib/gimp/

This looks like Gimp cannot find darktable plugin for version 4.8.0 · Issue #17039 · darktable-org/darktable · GitHub .

I am a darktable user, but for teaching purposes I had to install Rawtherapee to open RAW files via GIMP. However, I would recommend using the raw processors such as darktable or Rawtherapee themselves instead of GIMP for editing raw files. But the option is your choice.

@patjetta Hi! GIMP runs a command to check the version of DarkTable that’s installed and adds the DarkTable plug-in accordingly. When DarkTable updated their commandline API, GIMP’s check no longer worked and thus the plug-in wasn’t added.

We updated the code to check for Darktable in the 2.99 development release (with a lot of help from the DarkTable developers!) and I’ll try to backport it to 2.10 if we have any more releases before GIMP 3.0.

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In addition to the info provided by @Kofa…this script can also be used. I just confirmed that it works on Win11 and you can specify more editors so that you have a drop down list to choose from if you use additional software to GIMP.

https://darktable-org.github.io/luadocs/lua.scripts.manual/scripts/contrib/ext_editor/

I have GIMP, ON1 and Affinity Photo and I can use any of them via this method… from within DT doing a round trip with a Tiff file…

Hi Kofa
I use Gimp a great deal for astro photography as well as terrestrial.
Use my OMD EM5 mainly for terrestrial, but occasionally as a single shot colour in astro.
thx Pat

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Hi cmyk
Thanks, AWESOME REPLY.
Gives some clarity to what has changed and why.
It would be great if the backport could be implemented.
I have been opening the files in darktable and exporting them as tiffs into Gimp, which works but is very cludgy…
thx Pat

GIMP 2.10.36 and GIMP 2.99.18 does not see the new version of Darktable 4.8

Right - we didn’t merge the API update until after 2.99.18 was released: Issue #10572: Use new Darktable API (!1550) · Merge requests · GNOME / GIMP · GitLab

It’ll be available in 3.0 RC1 (the next GIMP release), and I’ll try to get it backported to 2.10.40 if we publish a last 2.10 release.

Each new version of darktable destroys the possibility of using it as a plug-in to import raw files into gimp 2.10. (at least in Manjaro).
DT 4.8 is no exception… Could this be deliberate?

No and it is silly to suggest as much.

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Definitely not - the Darktable developers worked with us to make a new GIMP-specific API to access Darktable in GIMP 2.99/3.0. I plan to backport it to 2.10.40 if we end up releasing that.

All my photos are developed with Darktable + Gimp.
I have trouble understanding why reprogramming the Darktable → Gimp 2.10 link is so complicated…

Absolutely nothing complicated and it’s already done. On the darktable side, the corresponding code is already in releases 4.8.x. On the GIMP side, the code was added to the codebase on May 25. The problem is that there hasn’t been a single GIMP release since then.

The only thing you can do is ask in GIMP issue tracker to speed up their new release, as the current situation is causing you inconvenience.

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It’s not complicated, but the code on the GIMP side is/was “brittle”:
As I understood the issue, the GIMP reads the message from darktable -v. If that message changes in an unexpected way, the link is broken. There are other (perhaps better) methods to do such checks, but I’m not sure any of them work on both Linux, and MS-Windows (MacOS would also be nice to have)

And as GIMP and darktable are independant projects, something like that is hard to prevent (there’s no reason darktable should be aware of what GIMP does).

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Yes, pretty much. The Darktable developers created a dedicated API for GIMP to use, so this shouldn’t happen again in the future (hopefully!)