Firstly I apologise that I am asking this and suspected I have asked a similar question in the past.
I love the way DT allows me to copy, import and organise my photo downloads into organized folders based upon date of capture and a designated jobcode. Below is an example of the excellent organization DT has done for me on a recent trip to Africa. I would really love if DT could also copy and organize my video files from this trip in the same intuitive fashion. I appreciate that DT is not a video editing program but it is a dam good digital asset manager and in my view would be further improved if it could copy and organize my video files. This is probably very relevant with the new mirrorless cameras which are as much a video camera as a still camera.
I am reluctant to put in a feature request if the DT community here sees this as just bloat for the program. I am unsure how difficult the coding would be. Any thoughts?
dt would then be my only place to manage everything my cameraās produce. I do not expect functionality regarding vidās other than basic dam functions: organizing like finding, keywording, flagging, filtering. And starting a video viewer from dt.
fwiw vkdt treats video files (compressed .mov.mp4 and raw .mlv.mcraw videos) same as any raw file. i find it very nice to have them appear in the list just the same as the other images for filtering and tagging. grading the raw videos makes of course some sense, but i hardly ever process the compressed video files. in that sense maybe darktable wouldnāt need all the ffmpeg code for decoding and playing/could resort to some external player. i havenāt enjoyed coding against ffmpeg much and would only recommend that to a very dedicated person. youād still need to grab some sort of thumbnail.
That is why a started with an apology for asking again. But having just been to Africa on game drives I shot both still and video and again I see the usefulness of having DT copying and organising all image files from my digital cameras. I like the idea of a single program doing this rather than trying to use multiple programs.
I like the idea of a program doing one thing well instead of being a jack of all trades. Digikam is an excellent DAM program. dt is an excellent raw processing program.
I havenāt taken the opportunity to really study Digikam but when I tried to use it today to copy my video files I could not understand how I could get it to use the exif data and a jobcode to organise my video files in the same fashion as DT. If I can work that out then I would use digikam to copy my video files. I want the same folder structure as DT creates because it works extremely well for me.
I have installed and uninstalled Digikam half a dozen times or more, trying to convince myself that it is a better DAM program than dt. Still using dt.
As for the original question, it would be nice if dt could import, rename and tag videos, even if it didnāt edit them. That said, I do so few videos itās not a big issue for me.
Unfortunately that costs effort not just build and release, but also discuss the scope. Is it just copy&import? Is it also the whole DAM business including preview, culling (not just a placeholder image)ā¦
Features no one spends effort in implementing them are not really important to have
Itās like AgX: things arenāt done by discussing itās sense or practicability but by having someone with a demand and the energy to prototype a solution that can end in a pull request for a release.
That much capability alone would make me 100% happy. DT is just so good at handling my stills and placing them in structured folders. Same camera produces videos and it would be great to use the copy and import feature of DT to place them in structured folders. I presume without knowledge that it just means allowing DT to copy MP4 files. I may presume very wrongly.
I am a windows user. But if I am the only one who sees value in DT copying and importing video files I will just live with it and manually copy and paste into folders myself. Tagging, culling and all the other stuff is not what I want DT to do with the videos. I only posted this post since I had videos and still images from my Canon R7 and would like a single program to organise them.
That makes perfect sense. If you find that dt does the best damn DAM job for you, then itās only natural to wish it could do the same thing for videos.
Personally, I use RPD and Geeqie under Linux, and it suits me well because I might use any of dt, RT, ART, Hugin, etc., on my images, so I like to treat the file system as my āimage databaseā. But thatās just me.
I donāt think you are the only one, there have been some positive comments in this thread already and I would also love darktable to be able to use its DAM features for videos too. However, this would only be useful for me if also tagging, rating, and other metadata things would be supported. For preview, a single image would be sufficient, and the ability to start an external viewer such as vlc would be handy. One might be able to build a āadd to kdenlive projectā button via lua scripting if this feature would exist.
I tried several times to wrap my head around digikam for organizing my video footage but never succeeded. I clearly prefer the clean way the darktable DAM works.
I echo the sentiment that DT does its DAM management in a clean way. When I first started using DT I was only interested in its editing capabilities and then at some stage either it changed or I changed and I realised it was a great way to sort twenty years worth of digital images by copying and importing all my HDDs, CDs, DVDs and other storage devices into an organised file system. I also really like how jobcode can be used to add descriptions such as the location of the holiday photos I take.
I follow the same philosophy (no database except as local cache, prominent use of the filesystem, Linux) that unsurprisingly leads to a very similar approach in my case. I also like to use geeqie (both for initial culling as well as viewing of processed images).
Has anyone found a convenient method for searching and displaying photos (and why not videos as well) that works within this scheme?
I think that I will never have the time to systematically tag individual photos, but I tag each event directory. However, once I find a way to search efficiently, I would like to systematically apply individual star rating to all my images. Then, I would love to be able to, for example, show all family pictures from 2023 rated at least 3 stars (quickly and conveniently!). Or to show all photos that I rated with 5 stars as a time series. Unfortunately, in my experience geeqieās search functionality is too inconvenient and slow for this.
I looked into digikam for organization and searching, but it is such a complicated, integrated, and slow beast.
