Organizing collections into broad categories: art / personal / work

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Organizing collections into broad categories: art / personal / work

publicradio

My photos, generally, fall into three categories:

Personal photos, mostly of my family;
Photos I shoot as a creative endeavor. I'm calling this the 'art' category;
Photos I took for a client. I'm a web designer, so I will often take photos of a client's office, or their products.

When I sit down to edit or browse photos, It's for one of these purposes—and only that purpose. If I want to compare architecture photos I've taken over the years, I don't want to open Darktable and see a bunch of family photos going back a decade. Personal photos can cause one to reminisce, and this evokes different emotions, and this is may not be the experience I want to have when opening the program.

So my question is this: is there a way to organize photos into broad categories, so you only see images related to the kind of work you're doing at that time? I thought about using tags for this purpose, and maybe that would work. But I already have these collections physically separated into different directories on my computer, so it would be nice to skip the step of always tagging new photos.

publicradio

I solved my own problem be reading the command line options in the manual:

I went to ~/.config/darktable/library.db, duplicated this file renamed it personal.db, then ran darktable --library ~/.config/darktable/personal.db. Then, I removed all film rolls except ones containing family photos. Then I started darktable normally, and removed the family photos.

Then, I added a function to my .bashrc file (I'm on Linux) and named it dt (for darktable). This function contains my line above, specifying the alternate library.

This is great because all my other settings are intact, and the same no matter how I start the program. I'll have to create another function, and another db file, for my work library.