[Digikam-users] Digikam+Darktable workflow

[jonas]

Hi list,

I just started using Darktable as my main photo editing/postprocessing
software. So far, I'm very happy with it. Still, all my photo albums are
organized in Digikam. Thus I'm searching for advice on a convenient
workflow for archiving and editing my photos.

Right now, my workflow is the following:

* I take pictures with my camera in RAW format and import them into a
  subfolder "raw" of the respective album in Digikam.
* Then I go through all the RAW pictures, select the good ones and tag
  them as "outstanding" (yellow flag).
* Then I use a search mask to show only the "outstanding" pictures,
  select all of them and open them with Darktable (Open with ...)
* In Darktable, I edit my pictures and rate them.
* If I decide to abort a picture in Darktable, I select it as aborted
  there, go to the Digikam search mask and mark it as aborted in
  Digikam as well (red flag).
* After finishing with editing, I export all pictures from Darktable in
  JPG format to the folder "../" (i.e. the album folder, with is the
  parent folder of current "raw" subfolder).
* Finally, I tag all pictures from the Digikam search as "done" (green
  flag) and remove them from the collection in Darktable.

As a result, I have my edited pictures in JPG format in the album folder
and all RAW files in a subfolder "raw".

A few things that I consider as inconvenient with this workflow:

* Flagging pictures as outstanding, aborted, done seems to be special
  to Digikam. Darktable doesn't know these flags and as a result I'm
  unable to do the flagging directly in Darktable while editing.
* It would be awesome if Digikam would know that the JPG version in the
  album folder is a new version of the RAW source version in the "raw"
  subfolder.
* If I find that I want to do some more editing later while browsing
  the JPG versions, I have to search for the corresponding RAW file in
  the "raw" subfolder and open it in Darktable for now. It would be
  awesome if I could simply select "open the RAW file in Darktable"
  from the JPG version.

I'm looking forward to read your suggestions on how to improve my
workflow with Digikam and Darktable. As I've written, I just started
using the two programs together, so I don't know about each and every
feature yet. I'm sure that there's much space for improvement :)

Cheers
 jonas