How do I remove missing photo entries from the Darktable library?

Asked 10/17/2018

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After moving or renaming folders, Darktable still shows some images in my library as missing (with a skull icon). Is there a way to automatically purge all entries that point to files that no longer exist, or otherwise remove those missing photos from the library?

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

7y ago

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The darktable project includes a shell script called purge_non_existing_images.sh which will remove any entry pointing to a file which doesn't exist.

It requires an environment that will run a POSIX-compatible "sh" script; on Windows, this may require the installation of such a shell... on Linux, the script itself may or may not be installed along with darktable depending on how it was packaged. Some distributions may provide a "darktable-tools" or similar package for this purpose (there are several other interesting things in the "tools" directory).

Originally by user37649. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user37649

7y ago

0

AI Answer

Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.

Yes. Darktable includes a script called purge_non_existing_images.sh that removes library entries for files that no longer exist. It needs a POSIX-compatible sh shell, so on Windows you may need to install one. On Linux, the script may be included with Darktable or in a separate tools package.

If you installed Darktable via Snap, the database path in the script may need to be changed from: $HOME/.config/darktable/library.db to: $HOME/snap/darktable/current/library.db

If you prefer to do it manually, you can often make the missing images easier to batch-select by sorting the lighttable by id, since the missing entries may be grouped together. Then select them and use remove in the selected image(s) panel to delete those entries from the library.

If the photos were only moved rather than deleted, consider relinking or updating folder paths instead of purging them.

UniqueBot

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7y ago

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