DARKTABLE-CLI(1)

📦
version 5.6.1 · 11 versions
, in fedora 43, fedora 44

✨ NAME ✨

okay bestie, meet darktable-cli — it's the command line variant of darktable, and honestly? she's the low-key icon of batch exports 💅

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

darktable-cli IMG_1234.{RAW,...} [<xmp file>] <output file> [options] [--core <darktable options>]

Options:

--width <max width>
--height <max height>
--bpp <bpp>
--hq <0|1|false|true>
--upscale <0|1|false|true>
--export_masks <0|1|false|true>
--style <style name>
--style-overwrite
--apply-custom-presets <0|1|false|true>
--verbose
--help
--version

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

So darktable itself is a digital photography workflow application for Linux, Mac OS X and several other Unices — full deets are in darktable(1), go read that queen 👑

darktable-cli is the command line variant, and her whole job is: you hand her a raw file and the matching xmp file, and she exports images. no GUI, no drama, just vibes and pixels ✨

💖 OPTIONS 💖

You must give her an input filename and an output filename. everything else? optional, bestie, do whatever 🫶

  • <input file> — the name of the input file you want to export. non-negotiable, she needs to know what to work with.
  • <xmp file> — the optional name of an XMP sidecar file holding the history stack data to apply during export. if you don't pass this, darktable will go hunting for an XMP file that belongs to the input file you gave her 🔍
  • <output file> — the name of the output file. darktable figures out the export file format from the file extension, so like, cute.png → PNG, obviously. and plot twist: you can also use all the variables available in darktable's export module inside the output filename. main character energy fr fr 👑
  • --width <max width> — optional parameter that lets you cap the width of the exported image at that many pixels.
  • --height <max height> — optional parameter that lets you cap the height of the exported image at that many pixels.
  • --bpp <bpp> — optional parameter defining the bit depth of the exported image; the allowed values depend on the file format. but ngl — as of right now this option is not yet functional 😭 if you actually need to set the bit depth, here's the workaround:
--core --conf plugins/imageio/format/<FORMAT>/bpp=<VALUE>

where FORMAT is the name of the selected output format, for example png.

  • --hq <0|1|true|false> — a flag for whether to use high quality resampling during export. defaults to true ✨
  • --upscale <0|1|true|false> — a flag for whether to allow upscaling during export. defaults to false.
  • --export_masks <0|1|true|false> — a flag for whether the masks used in the image get stored as layers in the exported image (as long as the format supports it, bestie — don't blame her if it doesn't). defaults to false.
  • --style <style name> — specify the name of a style to apply during export. heads up tho: if you specify a style, you also have to specify the path to the darktable configuration directory (i.e. --core --configdir ~/.config/darktable). defaults to no style specified.
  • --style-overwrite — the style you specified overwrites the history stack instead of being appended to it. no merging, it's giving full replacement 💅
  • --apply-custom-presets — with this one you get to decide whether darktable loads its set of default parameters from data.db and applies them, or whether it uses the defaults that ship with darktable instead. set this flag to false if you wanna run multiple instances at once. lowkey important, no cap.
  • --verbose — enables verbose output. she will tell you everything 🙈
  • --core <darktable options> — every command line parameter that comes after --core gets passed to the darktable core and handled as standard parameters. for a detailed description of those options, go see darktable(1) 🎀

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

👑 AUTHORS 👑

The principal developer of darktable is Johannes Hanika. and the (hopefully) complete list of contributors to the project is — brace yourself, it's a long guest list 🎀:

  • Developers: Pascal Obry, Hanno Schwalm, Victor Forsiuk, Mario Zimmermann, Ralf Brown, Andrii Ryzhkov, Dan Torop, Jeronimo Pellegrini, Daniele Pighin, Robert Mongold, Philipp Lutz, Bill Ferguson, Kofa, Martin Straeten, Miloš Komarčević, EdgarLux, Diederik ter Rahe, Stéphane Gourichon, Ryo Shinozaki, deekayhd, Benjamin Grimm-Lebsanft, Matjaž Jeran, esq4, David Smith, Hpbirkeland, Marko Vertainen, Yannic Meyer
  • Translators: Victor Forsiuk, Pascal Obry, Jeronimo Pellegrini, Martin Straeten, EdgarLux, Stéphane Gourichon, Ryo Shinozaki, Matjaž Jeran, esq4, Hpbirkeland, Marko Vertainen, Báthory Péter, RIM, Andrii Ryzhkov, Besmir Godolja, Johan Schiff, Kang-Wei Hsu, Tianhao Chai, 94tiger, BoneNI, Florian Tham, GameMaster0x, Jan Šmucr, Yannic Meyer, zxs-un
  • Sub-module rawspeed contributors (at least 1 commit): Miloš Komarčević, Roman Lebedev, Sidhartha, Steven Le Rouzic
  • Sub-module integration contributors (at least 1 commit): Pascal Obry, yuri
  • Sub-module lua-scripts contributors (at least 1 commit): Bill Ferguson, Tino Mettler, deekayhd, Andrii Ryzhkov, Ilya Palopezhentsev, Martin Straeten, Björn Lindström, Dan Zwell, fblampe, Aaron Patterson, dterrahe, masterpiga

And all those of you that made previous releases possible 🫶

This man page was written by Richard Levitte <richard@levitte.org>. Additions were made by Tobias Ellinghaus <me@houz.org>.

Copyright (C) 2009-2019 by Authors.

darktable is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GPL v3 or (at your option) any later version. slay 💚

and that's the whole page bestie, hope it ate ✨

darktable 3.0 — 2019-11-27 — that's the version and the date this page was living its truth, mwah 💋

📦 where this page comes from