Digikam ignores sidecar info from Darktable

[Remco Viëtor]

On vendredi 1 septembre 2017 17:14:31 CEST Willem Ferguson wrote:
> I am a new user of Digikam, doing most of my image manipulation in
> Darktable. As currently set up on my machine, the dk V5.6.0. AppImage
> does not see the the Darktable sidecar files: the Darktable EXIF data
> and image changes (e.g. cropping or contrast) are not shown when viewing
> Canon CR2 files in Digikam. Is there a way of achieving this?
> 
> Kind regards,
> 
> Willem Ferguson

And you will never see the changes you make in Darktable imported in Digikam 
when it concerns image edits like contrast or cropping.
Digikam takes the image from the image files as is (using the embedded jpeg for 
raw files), and cannot apply the edits you did in darktable. In addition, there 
is no guarantee that Digikam could reproduce the image edits based on the 
sidecar information, as that would require Digikam to use the same algorithms 
as Darktable (including parameter ranges etc.)

Digikam does see and is able to read the Darktable sidecars, as both are in 
the same format and follow the same naming convention (I use both darktable 
and digikam, and only have one sidecar per raw file). 

I'm not sure what you mean by 'Darktable EXIF data': the sidecars have only 
XMP data in them, and for those, there are several schemas that can be used.
Because of that, it's always a bit tricky to use sidecar files to transmit 
information between programs (and that's not what they are meant for anyway). 
But they are basically xml files, so in theory you could transform them through 
a script...

Remco