I'm on the Adobe photography plan and am looking to get off it. I find that I'm not using Lightroom sufficiently often to justify the cost - and I basically don't use any of the other bundled stuff. But I still want something with Lightroom-like features for more occasional use, so I'm looking at Darktable.
My understanding is that the best migration path is to generate XML sidecars using Lightroom, and then inhale these into Darktable. However it seems that LR only generates sidecars for raw files, and for jpegs etc it writes IPCT metadata directly to the source image file. I'm not keen on this as most of my photos are non-raw and modifying them breaks the whole non-destructive editing premise of Lightroom - even if it is to migrate off it.
I appreciate that editing and filtering settings are unlikely to carry across to Darktable with anything like full fidelity, and I'm ok with that. My main concern is manually-entered captions and geolocation metadata - of which I have quite a lot. Has anyone been down this route, and/or have any thoughts about options for successfully migrating?
Being a software dev, and knowing that the Lightroom catalogue is just a Sqlite database, one option is my writing some code to generate xmp sidecars for my jpegs using data in the database. From a bit of reading, Adobe basically store a fully-formed xmp data element in the database, but its a binary blob and compressed in a non-standard way. I'm pretty sure I could extract it, but it's work I'd rather avoid if tools are already available for this. Does anyone know of anything that already does this?
Other options/thoughts?