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Comment by virtualmic | Hacker News Reader

Sorry for somewhat unrelated query: is Digikam a replacement for Darktable? If not what's a good workflow between the two? I am a hobbyist photo taker and have only recently started using Darktable and really enjoy using it. However, it isn't a very efficient photo manager in my opinion (I may very well be missing something).

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I would say they're complementary. Digikam is more of an all-around organizer and has lots of import/export stuff, tagging, and now good face recognition too apparently (the old one was based on classic Haar cascades).

Darktable is for selecting a series of shots, going through them, developing the ones you want to keep.

Thanks, I will try Digikam too.

Which would you use to replace Picasa (on a Mac) ?

Darktable's targets digital photography enthusiasts or professionals. The learning curve is steep. Picasa's target demographic was "everyone". So probably Digikam.

I can confirm. Every now and then I want to edit some of my photos and run Darktable, only then to remember it has zero automation and a hundred of sliders for individual adjustments. It definitely requires dedication to use, more of that than I have to give for holiday photo editing.

You can get by using the same 5 sliders for almost all your photos. The other sliders remain available for edge cases or when you want to go the extra mile.

Would you say I replaces iPhoto/Photos on Mac?

I'm not sure how seamless the experience is on macOS, but I'm happily using digiKam on Linux as an iPhoto/Photos replacement.

It's nowhere near as polished as Photos, but it's capable, open source, and multi-platform. I hope to maintain my photo library for decades, so avoiding proprietary software / service lock-in was my most important consideration. This decision was reinforced earlier this year when we had to do some surgery on my spouse's meticulously curated Photos library: it's damned near impossible to completely preserve metadata when moving items between Photos libraries, and it is impossible to remove RAW files from stacked RAW+JPEG pairs in the Photos library. If I ever ran into those issues in digiKam (which I haven't), I'm confident that my SQL abilities would be sufficient to work around them.

FYI Photos/iPhoto also store their metadata as SQLite

> lots of import/export stuff, tagging

So perhaps closer to Photo Mechanic?

Darktable is mostly for RAW processing, Digikam is for organization / tagging afaik.

What is considered the best DAM (digital asset manager) for photos?

Adobe Lightroom for a lot of people.

Adobe Lightroom is only okay/good enough at management (same for Capture One. Picasa was the best I had used, unfortunately it's dead.

I'd say PhotoStructure.

(Disclaimer: I may be biased).

I haven't seen anything open source that comes close to Lightroom, even if you only consider LR versions from ten years ago. Although LR used to have the habit of getting really slow with larger libraries, it mostly just works and doesn't get in the way, while stuff like darktable is just... weird. Darktable has similar issues to GIMP, as in, that it hypothetically has a lot of features, but the usability is pretty poor overall, and it lacks some pretty vital things. GIMP only did 8 bit color until recently and a lot of operations are comically slow, while darktable has a very low legibility UI and keyboard shortcuts that don't make a lot of sense (e.g. navigation keys are different between modes), it isn't good at actualling keeping a library of photos, and crucially it has no way to quickly go to 100/200/400 % magnification (in LR you could hold the middle mouse button to instantly snap to 400 % iirc, extremely useful, completely absent in darktable).

Overall photo editing with open source software is kind of a drag. The features are more or less there, the UX isn't.

Very sad, but true. I’m still using LR6. Even though the map view doesn’t work any more and it cannot handle anything shot with my phone it is still the best option.

I wonder why the state of open source alternatives is so sad and what can be done to improve the situation.

How about RawTherapee? How does it stack against darktable and LR?

RawTherapee and Darktable is simply the Develop part of Lightroom.

So RawTherapee/Darktable + Digikam would cover lightroom areas?

I never used lightroom, so I don't know what I might be missing.

Lightroom classic is good, the new one is complete trash as far as UI and performance goes, same with all other new Adobe products. Illustrator, Photoshop. I guess they moved to web tech on the desktop, too.

I agree with the sentiment on the new Lightroom being trash, although I do think something nice came out of Adobe's efforts of the past few years.

One thing that kept me from post-processing a lot of my pictures was the necessity of doing it on the desktop. I'd come back from holidays and didn't really make the time, I guess it can be attributed to laziness.

Nowadays however, I have a subscription for Lightroom and can import the photos on my iPad and edit them on the go, or from the comfort of my couch. I love it.

When I fire up Lightroom classic on the desktop, it downloads everything (originals) I've uploaded on the iPad from the Lightroom cloud. Although this has some inconveniences - it's just dumped into a folder without any regard for organisation - it prevents a complete vendor lock-in. Without that feature I wouldn't have considered this approach.

I love to take pictures, but post-processing is not exactly my favourite activity. I feel that all the tricks I used to get me to develop more on the desktop (e.g. getting a midi board for editing) didn't really get me anywhere, but the Adobe cloud + iPad just did the trick for me.

https://www.digikam.org/news/2019-11-09-6.4.0_release_announ...

Search for "External Raw Import Tools as Plugins". I suggest you take a look at rawtherapee as well. I personally use both darktable and rawtherapee and find rawtherapee to be better suited for some usecases.

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