Since acquiring my iMac in 2013 I have gradually reduced my dependence on
legacy programs by running Windows or Ubuntu in virtual machines.
Shotwell is the sole program I’m dependent on now, with > 20,000 images from
various sources (film, scanner, digital camera), many with tags.
Although Shotwell offers to record tags within the associated image files, it
can’t do this with certain file formats - RAW and BMP for example.
I found that if I used exiftool to create a sidecar XMP file for a given NEF
file, including the necessary tag or tags, I could get darktable to adopt the
tag information on import, thereby automating the process.
I used sqlite3 running in my ubuntu virtual machine to access the shotwell
database, extract the tag information and create a shell script to make the
transition.
In case anyone wants to follow the same path, the commands I used were:
sqlite> .output Hierarchical.txt
sqlite> select 'exiftool -XMP:hierarchicalSubject="' || replace(ltrim(t.name,
"/"), "/", "|") || '"', '"' || filename || ".xmp" || '"' from PhotoTable p join
TagTable t on instr(t.photo_id_list, printf("thumb%016x", p.id)) > 0 AND
instr(t.name, "/") >0;
sqlite> .output stdout
sqlite> .output nonHierarchical.txt
sqlite> select 'exiftool -XMP:subject="' || replace(ltrim(t.name, "/"), "/",
"|") || '"', '"' || filename || ".xmp" || '"' from PhotoTable p join TagTable t
on instr(t.photo_id_list, printf("thumb%016x", p.id)) > 0;
sqlite> .output stdout
sqlite>
which gave me two text files, one for Hierarchical tags and one for
non-hierarchical tags, which I ran as shell scripts to create or update XMP
files for each tagged file.
Switching to OS X, I was then able to import all the images into darktable,
complete with the tags from Shotwell.
By and large, this has been successful, but I have a number of problems.
1. Frequent crashes of darktable, which generally occur when double-clcking one
of the uncategorised tags in the “collect images” section, to bring all images
with a particular tag into the lighttable view. Sometimes, persistence pays
off, and the images come up without a crash, but there are a few repeat
offenders.
2. Missing images in certain film rolls. This can be fixed by importing from
the particular directory involved, but relies on my detecting that there are
missing files in a given roll.
3. Frequent crashes in other context - particularly if trying to Collect Images
using parameters other than tags.
I’m using the DMG version of darktable 2.0.4, and so far I have failed to
compile my own version from source, so I can’t give “chapter-and-verse” details
of the causes of the crashes.
Is there anyone out there who is using the Mac version successfully, and
particularly anyone out there who has made this transition?
More in hope than expectation…
Michael
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