[Shotwell] Shotwell and batch processing by external tools

[Igor Wawrzyniak <igorwaw gmail com>]

 Hello,

I'll start with a huge thank you for the developers. I've been a long
time user of Shotwell. I tried some other software (recently Digikam)
and always came back. Though I loved the advanced features, the basic
things can be done way faster with Shotwell and 95% of the time all I
want is organizing and simple corrections.

That leaves the remaining 5% when I need other tools. There are some
Linux applications that work wonders on images (Hugin, GMic, Lensfun).
But the process of integrating them with Shotwell isn't very smooth.
One option is to open image with external editor from within Shotwell.
That works OK, I now have 2 versions of the image instead of
non-destructive edits, but at least they are linked together. They
share metadata and I only see the edited version by default.

But the process is only good for editing a single image. Doing any
sort of batch processing forces me to create new versions outside of
Shotwell. And then the files are considered separate images. I would
like Shotwell to detect 2 files are versions of the same image - by
filename or metadata. Or at least be able to select 2 images and
manually inform it: this is a base photo, this is a modifed one.

I suppose that counts as a feature request - unless there's already an
option I missed. Or maybe I can somehow change my habits? Here's what
I'm doing so far:
- copy photos from camera(s) to a temporary directory, compare and
delete unneeded,
- import to Shotwell's collection, I like the standard layout of year/month/day
- mostly I just tag the pictures, do things like cropping, levels
etc., occasionally open in Gimp for more serious editing,
- I set Shotwell to monitor the directory for new files and to write
metadata to both images and sidecar files for maximum compatibility.
If I need to do batch processing, I save new files next to the old
ones, they are detected and imported into collection and there is a
high chance they still have metadata. So that only leaves a problem of
duplicate images.
- I mostly shoot JPGs, I would like to try RAW, but I'm not sure how
they would fit with my workflow.

Thanks in advance for any tips,

Igor