Darktable: Introduction to Lighttable

Explore image management and organization in Darktable

Lighttable view

What is Lighttable?

In our first blog on Darktable, our primary focus was on various aspects of image editing through the utilization of various Darktable modules. We talked about Lighttable briefly, but not in detail. Today, let’s learn about how we can use Lighttable to manage and organize our photos.

Primarily, Lighttable is useful for three major tasks:

• For importing and exporting images

• Organizing images

• Batch processing

Apart from these three tasks, Lighttable is also useful for metadata editing.

Let’s go though these functions of Lighttable in detail.

Import and Export

Importing image into Darktable

Import tab from the left panel in Lighttable

Before starting the editing process, we need to import the images in Darktable. On the left top corner, we can see the Import tab and ‘add to library’ option below that for importing our images. We can import all the Darktable compatible image formats through this dialogue box.  If you want to check image information, Lighttable has an ‘Image Information’ tab on the left panel which provides basic information like name, import date, camera model, lens details etc.

Exporting image from Darktable

Once we finish editing, we can use the Export module in the Lighttable to export our image in desired format.

There are three tabs inside Export module as below:

1. Storage options

   We can define respective output folder and set option related to saving a file on conflict of name

2. Format options

   We can define file format options like JPEG, PNG etc and quality of image which we want to export.

3. Global options

   Global options help to set image size, profile etc. These options are helpful to export our image as per our end platform requirements.

I would recommend playing with the ‘preset’ option on the top right corner of the Export module to define those as per different platform requirements. ‘Preset’ definitely saves a lot of time on exporting our images if we intend to use our exported images on different platforms.

Organizing images

Image organization in Lighttable

Second major use of the Lighttable is to organize the images by setting Ratings or Color labels using the bottom panel. Once we set the desired ratings or color labels to our images, this will help us to categorize our images as per our need. 

How can we use these filters?

Let's say I have imported 100 images into Lighttable and I have given 1/2/3 ratings to 80 images out of those and 4/5 ratings to the remaining 20. Now, I have the choice to only edit images having 4 or higher ratings. If I change my mind later and want to include 3 rated images, I can do that using ratings filter. Same goes for color labels as per my categorizing methodology. If we want to further use these ratings and color labels effectively, we can use the ‘collection filter’ tab from the left panel.

Batch Processing

Modules for batch processing

‘Styles’ module helps us to save a tremendous amount of time, if we want to apply similar basic corrections to all the images. We can use a combination of ‘History stack’ and ‘styles’ module to save our required set of image editing steps and later, use these styles to apply to other images.

How can we use ‘Styles’ for batch processing?

1. Edit first image as per our needs

2. Go to ‘Style’ module in Lighttable and click on ‘Create’

3. Select set of modules from history stack which we wanted to save as ‘Style’

4. Save and use this Style for other images

Other Lighttable modules

• Modules like ‘selection’ , ‘actions on selection’ are useful to select and remove/delete images from Lightable

• Metadata can be edited using ‘Metadata editor’

I hope this information is useful to have a basic understanding of Lighttable. Let me know your feedback in the comments.