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by FiniteLooper 532 days ago
I'm very interested in DarkTable, but I have years on photography in Adobe Lightroom. I'm growing tired of LightRoom, but I feel like I'm now locked into that ecosystem. Is there some kind of migration to move my LightRoom edits out of there and into something like DarkTable?
2 comments
glitchcrab 532 days ago
No, it's simply not possible. You can migrate some information using sidecar files but Lightroom's edit details are proprietary and so cannot be migrated.

https://darktable-org.github.io/dtdocs/en/overview/sidecar-f...

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jl6 532 days ago
I’ve been using Digikam for 20 years, and although it’s pretty good now, it has been a rough 20 years in some respects. Nevertheless I’d do it all again rather than suffer the trap of putting data into a system designed to prevent you getting it out.
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orbital-decay 532 days ago
Edits are essentially impossible to transfer between RAW development software, and even between major versions of the same software. It's not specific to Lightroom, Digikam, or Darktable. You would have to replicate everything, from the color science to quirks and bugs. Adobe literally ships previous versions of Lightroom's processing code in each new Lightroom version, to avoid messing anything up. As does Darktable (it still contains the previous code for compatibility) and any other software.
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andyjohnson0 532 days ago
I wrote this [1] when I moved from LR to DT. Its my best attempt to batch-create xmp sidecars (which DT can^Wclaims to read) from the LR catalog. Despite the terrible name it was adequate for my purposes, but I only ahoot jpeg not RAW.

[1] https://github.com/andyjohnson0/XmpLibeRator

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