It’s just that last 80% that’s the challenge. The new version will be much better, and is almost ready. I use some static gallery generators to generate preview galleries, and I have a self-built gallery on my website, but I don’t update it much. I don’t currently have a publishing process that I’m happy with, though my current side project is aimed at tackling exactly this. This is a nice little timesaver Automator is one of those things that I use rarely but always think “I should do more with this.” I’ve got another Automator script that proxies through to a little scp wrapper so I can right-click a photo and upload it to the web, leaving the URL in my clipboard.

I also have a macOS Automator script set up that watches my “finished” directory for new images, and copies it to my “publishing queue” directories if it matches a regex. (I wrote a blogpost about this a few months ago, if you want more detail.) The import process causes darktable to generate thumbnails for all of the imported images, but in the end it will only be able to keep the most recent in its cache.

It is recommended that you not use this option to import a large number of images at the same time. I also use macOS’ filesystem tags to help me find things. Check this option to import images in the selected folder and all subfolders. For storage I basically use the filesystem directories by year, subdirectories for each shoot/event (along with some generic folders like “202005 - misc Toronto” for one-off snaps through the month).

Personally, I approach storage and publishing as two separate solutions.

Darktable import from external disk