Five years ago, I had the following exchange with Kirk:
Bob,
It contains all of the edit instructions that Raw Therapee applies to the raw file to produce the final output. They're text files, but not xml files.
But then it gets complicated and I don't understand all of the nuances. Here is an example of developing a single raw file with the jpeg going into a sub directory. The attached zip file contains the following
The zip was too large but here is the file structure:
/20181023-0002.orf -- original raw file
/20181023-0002.orf.pp3 -- my edits to the raw file
/20181023-0002.xmp -- my meta data
/jpegs/20181023-0002.jpg -- my resultant jpeg
/jpegs/20181023-0002.jpg.out.pp3 -- the edits that produced this particular jpeg
(In this simple case it should be identical to /20181023-0002.orf.pp3)
I have attached 20181023-0002.orf.pp3
Personally, I mainly care about the upper level .pp3 file and it would be nice if PM recognized its association with 20181023-0002.orf and 20181023-0002.xmp. But I am aware that PM doesn't and in general I can work around it. Basically, I don't start to use Raw Therapee until I have finished using PM to add metadata and archive the original raw file.
It's actually quite trivial to add another file type that should be associated with an image in PM. We never had (to our knowledge) anyone request that PM handle .pp3 files. I'd be happy to add them for RAW files, but they're not a good match for JPEGs since JPEGs are perfectly capable of having embedded metadata and all reasonable JPEG interpreters will both preserve unknown embedded metadata and not be thrown off by its presence. If that pp3 data is important to the JPEG then it should be embedded instead of lazily written as a sidecar.
I'll make sure that PM6 treats .pp3 files as an associated file type for RAW (non-DNG) files.
-Kirk
Subsequently, Kirk followed through and PM now moves/copies files of the form {filebasename}.orf.pp3 along with the raw file {filebasename}.orf. I have used this extensively since it was added and it is now integral to my workflow. However, over the holidays I managed to shoot myself in the foot by mistakenly assuming that this behaviour would extended to other raw file types. I was editing some photos from 7+ years ago and in those days my cameras were Canons and the raw files were cr2s. The unfortunate result was that the {filebasename}.cr2.pp3 files did not move with the raw files and I lost quite a few hours of edits.
Would you please include at least {filebasename}.cr2.pp3 files to the list of files that transfer with the raw file. Even better would be if you could transfer any file of the form {filebasename}.*.pp3 with the raw file. (* should be three ?s -- that is, three characters representing a raw file type -- but if I enter that it displays as a smiley -
- which is not quite what I want.)
Thanks
Bob M
