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Comment by LandR | Hacker News Reader

I was worried when I moved to linux from Windows that I would miss Lightroom but Dark Table easily replaced it!

It's fantastic and I now I prefer it to Lightroom (Although I haven't used the latest version of Lightroom).

I tend to use https://rawtherapee.com/ for processing CR2 -> JPG images, and use my own filesystem for organization.

That said I shot a model this week and went back to trying to use Dark-table to go over the results as quickly as possible, it was actually pretty efficient to rate the images.

(In an hour-long shoot I'd taken about 500 images, and it was painless to look at each RAW file and star the ones that I wanted to keep. I went through everything and ranked about 50 as three-stars, then after a bit of thought and coffee marked the 25 I was going to hand over to her as 5 stars which I could then later process and edit with rawtherapee afterwards.)

> use my own filesystem for organization.

This got me interested. Care to elaborate?

I guess there are a lot of photo-managers that let you import your images, tag them, find duplicates, etc. I don't want to touch anything like that - I want to keep my images in a structure that makes sense to me.

Keeping my own structure is one reason why I don't use any software that won't work "in-place". So I chose rawtherapee because I can point it at a directory of raw images, get a set of JPGs out, and it won't try to move/file/organize them behind my back.

Anyway my structure looks something like:

    /srv/
    /srv/images/
    /srv/images/2020
    /srv/images/2020/08/
    /srv/images/2020/08/05.Claire
    /srv/images/2020/08/05.Claire/RAW
    /srv/images/2020/08/05.Claire/JPG
    /srv/images/2020/08/05.Claire/Results
    /srv/images/2020/08/12.Sanna
    ..

Basically data-based, but I also create a ".info" directory beneath each per-person tree which will have:

     location=Blah
     event=Random Shot|Birthday|Party|Event
     date=05.08.2020
     tags=model,claire,monochrome
     theme=pirate
     contact=phone-number|email|address
     ..

Then I have a shell-script that lets me search for all shoots which had a specific location, tag, name, or similar.

This is completely off topic, but you’ve triggered me with your date format of 05.08.2020. Why not 2020.08.05?? So much less ambiguity, plus then it will match your directory structure!

Typing away from the computer; we'll assume that if I checked what is currently setup I'm doing it the correct way!

YYYY-MM-DD formatted date strings also sort better when sorted as text.

AKA ISO 8601

I love Darktable, and it definitely is a replacement for Lightroom and way way more, but the UX is definitely not designed for beginners - nor is the tooling. I had a lightroom trial a month ago and ended up editing a huge amount of photos quickly and to my satisfaction. Darktable just slows me down and I never bother.

Would recommend going through tutorials from Bruce Williams https://www.youtube.com/user/audio2u

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