Future support for RawTherapee *.pp3 sidecars?

Feature Requests
1

Hi there! New user here, hope this is the right place to ask this question :slight_smile:

I recently switched from shooting RAW back to JPG, to free myself from editing hell and cut down on the time I spend processing photos instead of shooting them. It’s working very well for me, but there are still times when I need to make minor edits to color temperature or touch up a rough spot, and I’ve been using RawTherapee for that. I’d like to also use PhotoStructure to organize my photos, but the two programs don’t seem to play well together right now.

RawTherapee saves edits in *.pp3 sidecars, so if I want my changes to be visible in PhotoStructure, I need to save a new copy of the file, which means any photos I edit have to be duplicated, and I haven’t found a clean way to streamline this process.

I noticed a line in the 2024 release notes that future releases of PhotoStructure may switch to RawTherapee’s library for rasterizing RAW files. If this is the case, is there a possibility that this could also include support for those *.pp3 files? It would be immensely helpful to just make edits in RawTherapee and have PhotoStructure pick up the edits from the sidecars, without needing an involved process for duplicating and filtering anything I’ve edited.

Alternatively, if there’s an existing workaround for this that I can use right now, please let me know! I only just started dabbling with PhotoStructure, so there could be a solution I don’t know about. Thanks!

2

I’d be happy to add support for previews that respected .pp3 edits, but I need to have the command line that does that work, but the last time I checked, the rawtherapee cli didn’t support this. That certainly could have changed!

Ideally I could add a generic configuration to support other raw image development sidecars, so in the future it wouldn’t require any changes from me.

Note that this does throw a monkey wrench into image deduplication: a bunch of places assume that assets will have stable image hashes, but if you can substantially change brightness and white balance point for an image, I may not be able to correctly deduplicate images effectively.

I’ll think more about this.

1 Like
3

Thanks so much for clarifying! Those are good reasons to hold off on a feature like that.

I’ll experiment a bit with different ways to organize files so I can keep edited and unedited photos together without too much manual copy/pasting. There might be a workflow I haven’t thought of that can get me there. Thanks!