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I am photo documenting a little pet project I have, and when I have progress captured I put those images into a folder named after the project. However, when I run Dark table, the newly added pictures are not there.

The new pictures only appear when I again do Import - Folder..., but I would prefer to just press some refresh button to load new images in that folder. How to do that?

Tomáš Zato
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In my experience importing again is the only way because Darktable maintains folders as film rolls in a database table. It does not monitor the file system.

An advantage of this approach is there are many other ways to collect images. Another advantage is that all collections are independent of the file system...you can export jpgs back to the original folder without making the light table view confusing.

Bob Macaroni McStevens
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    I do not expect darktable to automatically reload by monitoring the FS, just to auto add all images in the folder I recently imported. I honestly do not understand darktables collection system at all. – Tomáš Zato Apr 03 '21 at 20:21
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    @TomášZato-ReinstateMonica Importing images adds the images to Darktable's database. Darktable always runs off its database. So importing is the only way to instruct Darktable to update the database when you have made changes to a folder. Importing loads the file locations into the database and then Darktable works from the database. – Bob Macaroni McStevens Apr 03 '21 at 21:40
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    @TomášZato-ReinstateMonica The filmroll abstraction is like a real film roll. Once you take a roll of film out of the camera, you cannot automatically add images to it. You have to put the roll back in the camera add more images and then take the film roll out again. The advantage of the way Darktable works is that nothing changes automatically. For example, nothing changes if you accidentally copy-paste pictures into an existing folder. – Bob Macaroni McStevens Apr 03 '21 at 21:44
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    @TomášZato-ReinstateMonica There are many other ways to form Darktable collections besides film rolls. For example by date, by camera, by tag, and by combinations of all of these using logical operators. It is a very powerful system because a collection is a query of Darktable's database. – Bob Macaroni McStevens Apr 03 '21 at 21:46
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    @TomášZato-ReinstateMonica Tagging images with the name of your project will allow you to collect images across several film rolls...or you can just reimport each time you add images. But tagging is easier because you don't have to think about the file system. No copying images from one place to the other. No need to deal with duplicates. etc. Imagine an image that is part of several projects...a book, a web page, and I gallery print. – Bob Macaroni McStevens Apr 03 '21 at 21:49
  • Thanks for the explanations, I appreciate it a lot. – Tomáš Zato Apr 06 '21 at 12:04
  • In all honesty, the comparison to film rolls is ridiculous. Statistically, nobody is using rolls of film anymore nor limiting themselves to their capabilities and software shouldn't impose such limits. – mikebabcock Nov 06 '21 at 18:43
  • @mikebabcock Satistically half the people in our conversation buy 135 film in 100’ rolls ;) I used an analogy to physical film rolls for explanatory power. In terms of Darktable, it provides an orthogonal designation to the file system. For example you can combine two film rolls into a single folder if you use Darktable’s internal ‘selected images’ panel to allow Darktable’s database to track the changes. Just like you can put negatives from different rolls in the same sheet of sleeves. – Bob Macaroni McStevens Nov 06 '21 at 20:22
  • @mikebabcock Incidentally, not tying everything to the file hierarchy allows the use of local copies and their synchronization. – Bob Macaroni McStevens Nov 06 '21 at 20:38