Darktable: How to fix "Image .. is currently unavailable" (after having moved imaged to different (sub-)folder on drive)?

Question

After having moved a bunch of photos to a (sub-)folder on the drive, darktable no longer finds them and when double-clicking the resp. thumbnail (in darktable's lighttable), the error message pops up: "Image .. is currently unavailable".

Is there really no way to fix this by a click-of-a-button? Does darktable (v.3.8.0) expect the user to manually chuck out all offending thumbnails after having moved the images on disk?

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Related links:

https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/issues/3632 (feature request)

After exporting from Darktable, I continue getting a message stating, "IMG...CR2 file is currently unavailable" (not a question)

CR2 files "Currently unavailable" (an answer without a question)

Answer 1

Reimport the images into Darktable from the new location so Darktable’s database has information about their location.

Use the Remove option in the Selected Images Module to remove the incorrect duplicate old entries from the database

The Move option of the Selected Images Module can be used to move images between directories while keeping Darktable’s database up to date.

For large scale file moves such as a terabyte from one drive to another, I find it easier to move the files, delete Darktable’s database, and reimport from the new location…even though it can take a few hours, it can run while I sleep. Otherwise I rarely move files around because I have many other things I prefer to file management.

Answer 2

There is no simple click-a-button solution but darktable ships a shell script purge_non_existing_images.sh to remove all non-existing images (aka the images that have been moved) from the database, see the documentation.

To add the images from the new location back to darktable, you need to re-import them manually as if they were new images.