On 04/09/2013 01:20 PM, Simon wrote: Hi!
I found the OPs description very interesting and might add some thoughs of my own here. [...] >> 1. Copy a few hundred images over from the camera. >> 2. Organize them into projects (i.e. film rolls in darktable) >> 3. In every project/film roll, look at every image, delete the bad >> ones, do some basic editing (crop, exposure, sometimes white balance) >> 4. Tag the faces with the names >> 5. Put certain images into albums >> 6. Export to internet gallery This tends to follow my own workflow, however in step 2 I use a more technical sorting that I can autmate by my ingester script. I can not call it from dt but I can call it from my desktop and then import what it produced to dt. So I end up with photos sorted to sometimes several folders/film rolls automagically. Step 4 is also quite important for me, though my indexing is based on a controled vocabulary of hierarchical index terms and does not really include people or names. In principle dt can handle the hierarchy but the handling has "room for improvement". >> Point 3 is where most of the time goes, and a lot of >> stuff there seems to be much more clumsy to achieve in >> darktable than in Aperture. >> >> First thing, I'm in darkroom view now, which means that I >> can't delete images. I'm not really sure what that >> separation between light table and dark room is for, >> anyway? Sure, it makes sense to separate import/export >> and organizing images into film rolls from the dark room >> part. >> > in the darktable way, we try to separate things in analogy > to film photography. I.e. "darkroom" represents the place > where the development of your images happens, which is > usually separated from going through the shots, picking, > tagging and rating. I admit that I can work very well with this separation, though I always had the feeling that one could have both worlds if dt would just use dialogues that pop up upon calling. (But I think this is out of the question.) > Having said this - in digital photography things change > quite a bit of course, which is why we try to build > bridges between the two sections, e.g. allowing style > application in lightroom or rating and (color-) tagging in > darkroom. dt's functions for marking a reject in darkroom is IMHO pretty handy. Same for * and colour markers. I tend to review my rejects before finally moving them to the litter so I can live well with reject in darkroom and move to light table later on, display only the rejects. I understand that the OP doesn't do this second review. I may note, that there seems to be a slight sync-problem in the film strip of darkroom, if I mark an item as rejected though. (It stays in development mode but is removed from the strip. I think reject should move to the next image.) [...] >> Same with tagging: I don't need the face recognition >> stuff from Aperture which doesn't work well, anyway. But >> I'd like to tag in dark room view where I see the image >> full screen and know who's on it (using tags for people's >> names, mainly). Plus, even if I do it in light table view >> later, it's a terrible hell of clicking and shoving the >> mouse around, as there doesn't seem to be a possibility >> to change the currently selected image without using the >> mouse. (If there is, please tell me!) > There is. The standard shortcut for changing images in > lighttable mode are just the arrow keys. May I ask how? It shounds easy enough but at least in my freshly compiled git version the arrow keys move around in the light table but they /do not/ change the focus of the images. I.e. I am not able to actually switch between images using the keyboard. Some vertical scolling happens, but the focused image stays. Now for much of my "tagging" a smaller preview is in fact helpful plus in many occasions several pictures the same tags (at least as a subset). So marking several and then add the tags would in indeed be desireble, and as the addition of keywords and other metadata is a keyboard action I think it would be great if this could be done without the mouse. If it would work as you suggest + shift arrow keys do a marking, two shortcuts for metadata editor (doesn't have a shortcut assigned, ups ;) and activate the tag input line would improve the input here quite a lot. (I admit, I do not understand why Ctrl-T opens another input and doesn't just activate the module nor use it's functionality.) I think your menitioned way of moving around works only if you set the preview size to use the full screen, so you have only one image. What you toggle by Alt-1. (I admit, I was not aware of Alt-1 cause Alt-1 changes my desktop, but I used the mouse wheel to zoom to that size.) Then the scrolling of the light table coincides with moving the image. I may add that there is another silly problem with the mouse actions. As, in a way your're forced to use the mouse to give focus to an image (point & click) at least I tend to use the mouse to focus the proper controls for metadata like metadata editor and tagging. However, this involves moving the mouse over other images effectively moving the focus to an fro till I click on some image. It stays where it should be after the click it's just a bit strange that things change all the time and I'm always thinking about wether the correct item has the focus. Probably, another behavour was orignally intended? > This should work in both the temporarily zoomed image > using the "z" shortcut and - what you probably want to use > - the full-image view of lighttable to which you can > switch using ALT+1. In fact z + arrow keys allows a preview but does not set the focus as would be required for adding metadata. At least it doesn't here. [...] > * Not being able to add a second tag after having applied > one using Ctrl+T is clearly a bug and needs to be solved. > Please file an entry here: > http://www.darktable.org/redmine/projects/darktable/issues/new I may add here that Ctrl-T does not work well with structured keywores (A|B|C) as it doesn't use the list of keywords that dt knows. I may also add that even if I focus the tagging module I could not just type C to assign the A|B|C concept list or select a proper tag if I have e.g. D|E|C (if C is a homonym and may represent several concepts). What I can do is key in A and get a list of all subconcepts of A hit -> start typing the next in the row and so on. IMHO it would be better if I key in C to get both chains A|B|C and D|E|C for selection and not nothing if C is only a subconcept of something. Also if A is something like "longerkeyword" and I type "long" it should be considered to allow <tab> to "expand" the suggestion of "longerkeyword". This is a quite common shortcut. I understand that at the moment there is only a binding for right arrow. BTW: structured keywords are IMHO easier to navigate by mouse, if they are displayed as a tree. Especially, one should keep in mind that it could get a quite lengthy list if you have a decent substructure. Also some of the concepts can be a bit broad so dispalying A|B|C as such could require quite some hoizontal scrolling. BTW/2: the same comment about trees holds for film rolls. I admit that I would like to have a collapsable tree here as well. Like drawers that contain boxes that contain folders folders, which finally contain the slides. Sometimes I know it's in the blue box so its sensible to open only the blue one, ie. expand only that subtree. (But I never worked in flim and film archiving so my analogy might be wrong.) [...] >> drags. Then, to see the image cropped, I have to somehow >> unfocus the crop module again. The quickest way I found >> is switch to the next image with space and then back to >> my current image with backspace (which is a lot quicker >> than finding and focusing another module with the mouse), >> but that's still /very/ cumbersome, of course. > I would consider this behaviour a bug. Activating the > module using shortcuts should always move focus, too. We > should change this implementation, I completely agree with > you. Actually, especially the crop tool is a bit strange with it's focus. E.g. it doesn't get a focus if you just activate it or choose a submenu. In fact I often resort to enabeling some sort of grid to ensure that I get the handles I want. But till now I do not understand what happens here focus-wise, so I couldn't even call it a bug. It could well be a bug on layer 8. >> Please don't get me wrong: Darktable is great all in all, >> especially in its dark room features Yepp! Definitely. Metadata is a very weak point, however. [...] >> But for me, much more important than all the feature >> masses I'll never use is the possibility to work quickly >> and move from image to image in seconds, quickly >> adjusting each one, using the mouse only where the mouse >> actually is better (faster) than the keyboard. Agree. Especially what's called "tagging" (adding metadata) in dt-speak is something I really spend quite a bunch of work. Till now, however, I use another cataloging software. I admit that I'd like to move this to dt as it would ease up some of my workflow. >> I don't fear learning different stuff; so if I oversaw >> possibilities in darktable, please tell me. Especially >> tagging looks more or less unusable to me at the moment, I fear, I have to agree. >> actually a show stopper—I sincerely hope that I'm just >> doing it wrong right now. :-) > You directly addressed one of the field where we > definitely need improvement. We have discussed the > implementation of tags and tagging quite some times and > all aggree that there lies a lot of potential > improvements. So if you have concrete ideas or suggestions > - let us know! I think tagging should also take into account the other metadata fields like title and so on. Still, I feel adding IPTC support would be best, but even if one doesn't want to add all IPTC fields I feel at least location fields should be available. Where was this shot taken and so on. >> My next computer won't be a Mac anymore, I'll switch back >> to Linux. The thing I fear losing most is Aperture, but >> darktable is /very/ near being a good replacement. It >> already is more than that technically, but not so >> workflow-wise. I don't know Apperture but I agree that the main weaknesses of dt are probably not in the darkroom. -- Kind regards, / War is Peace. | Freedom is Slavery. Alexander Wagner | Ignorance is Strength. | | Theory : G. 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