Slightly off-topic, but can anyone recommend a good app for consolidating all your pictures from different sources? (macOS)
I have pictures on Dropbox, Facebook, and a huge removable drive. I want to view all of these pictures in one place in chronological order. I have 50,000+ pictures and it is so overwhelming where to even begin. :-/
I can't seem to get darktable to do this do smoothly for me.
+ Tip: If you have:
.
|
|---Pictures
|
|---dir1
|---dir2
|---dir3
|---dir4
|---dir5
...
|---dirn
You can select more directories than you have threads available. I saw several orders of magnitude speedup in the import. All those threads kept the CPU running. All that running CPU kept the IO flowing.
+ Advice: Work in two stages. Get all the images locally first. Download from Dropbox and Facebook onto that big disk. Then import them. Once they are local, you can manage them, back them up, etc.
Adobe finally made Adobe Lightroom sync your library with the cloud. So you can now have all your photos from on all your devices.
If you’re under 2TB, iCloud Photos supports all formats including RAW. If you’re over 2TB, Flickr Pro.
// It’s not there yet, but third party tools that integrate with Photos and use non-destructive “edits” are now approaching the usability of Aperture, barring the ability to have 5 levels of selectivity (e.g. marking photos in multiple passes from 1 - 5 stars, for rapidly paring down a large shoot).
Do you have any recommendations? I'm very familar with Lightroom, but am trying to reduce my use of "rented" software.
Despite being a formerly avid paying user of Flickr since 2005, I can’t disagree with this more.
There are some open source solutions in this space, but AFAIK no really great ones.
You could just use bitkeeper (now ope source) for just kerping track of files - it's said to handle binary files better than git.
I suppose you already have a Mac or two - I'm curious if anyone use icloud with only free software? Is it possible without any Apple devices - and would it even make sense to try?
> darktable is an open source photography workflow application and raw developer. A virtual lighttable and darkroom for photographers. It manages your digital negatives in a database, lets you view them through a zoomable lighttable and enables you to develop raw images and enhance them.
at that point I simply began spelunking around the site out of sheer amazement, just trying to see how they communicated things. To me, it’s maybe the best presentation of a product of any kind I have ever seen. It answered all of my questions directly, without any kind of trouble navigating.
I came to darktable website to learn what darktable does not that there is another piece software that I do not know which does a somewhat similar thing but in a different manner.
not only this is not helping the clueless visitor, but it is advertising a major competitor and shows your software as being inferior to this commercial competitor.
IMHO not mentioning lightroom is a smart move, I discovered darktable without having any knowledge of lightroom for the simple reason that adode products do not exist on Linux. Also I should mention that I use darktable as an alternative to gimp which I chose as an alternative to photoshop 5 when I made the switch to linux.
This to point out that you should not presume of how people use software either, expecially with software that can cover some many different uses as photoshop.
It's a great software though.
I want to see what the apps looks like if I'm even going to download it, do at least a minimum of effort to entice potential users.
That said, pain points for me have included:
- Managing multiple databases across multiple machines. My use-case is I have a central database with all photos on one machine. Generally do initial edits on another and then move the files across. I have yet to find a workflow - with the "Local sync" feature, or simply moving files and their edit files across the network - that feels simple. Should be noted that dragging files + their XLF's from temporary machine to primary machine wont import into the "database" for you. And you have to make sure all your directory structure and naming schemes are the same on all your machines.
- The community around "styles" (presets) doesn't scratch the surface compared to Lightroom's. There's one main website [1], but it's not really curated. I'd like to see more blog posts and pros offer these.
Darktable's database is not the single source of truth. Functionally, it's an index over the XMP sidecar files. When it's deleted, rebuilding is 'simply' a matter of reimporting all the files. The XMP sidecar files are the actual data records...well ok, so are the images but they're immutable.
Local-sync's is inherently mutable state semantics. That's probably never what I want in my workflow. Disk space is cheap enough that I don't find an append only workflow cost prohibitive. Particularly since duplicating a Darktable image only consists of a new XMP file there's little point in overwriting an existing one to save a few bytes. [1]
Practically speaking, local-sync doesn't work for me because it munges filenames. This breaks my tiered backup logic...or rather complicates reasoning about it beyond the number of brain cells I can commit to it.
What I think I want is more tooling for operating outside of Darktable (I already ingest images from my camera with Rapid-Photo-Downloader). Two tools in particular. One which takes a list of XMP files and generates new XMP files based on Darktable's duplicate semantics. The other an inverted index of all the XMP documents. The goal is to move file operations outside of Darktable where they can be automated in the shell.
[1]; XMP files could be versioned with Git if duplicate files are a problem. They aren't for me.
On a personal note, I desperately want to get into using darktable as Lightroom is the last piece proprietary software that I rely on. However, it seems Leica M8 support is still “not there” [2]. They do link to how to help out by adding support at the top of the page, but as mine was stolen two years ago I am not much help and I do want to be able to support my range of cameras dating back to 2006.
But none of these are core features. And none are the only way to accomplish the things they do.
Couldn't you just outright buy a Capture One license?
Photos will last longer than the SW used to edit them. Don't lock them in.
Unlike Photoshop, which is primarily a pixel-based editor, both Lightroom and darktable tend to work on the image in aggregate, with tools which are particularly useful to images created via a lens and digital sensor. Lightroom has a lot of its choice/sequence of tools "pre-baked", and there's a lot of wisdom in its choices.
The tools in darktable are more esoteric. They're based on a variety of traditional and recent mathematical work in image processing. It takes a bit more knowledge and taste to choose the best tools, and set their parameters well for a particular image.
Depending on hardware, you may find that the Adobe tools are a bit faster.
As a sibling poster mentions, of course darktable is open source, and not subscription-based. It has an active development community. As Pascal Obry, who managed the current release, writes in an email to the darktable list: "It is also an important release as new developers have shined in and proposed some amazing features." There's also active community of darktable users who help each other to understand how to use it to work on a variety of images. I find these discussions enlightening in order to gain a more general sense of ways to think about image processing. One home of this community is https://discuss.pixls.us/c/software/darktable.
I've never missed lightroom since moving to dark table. But then I only do pretty basic editing of raw files.
It has a couple of editing features that lightroom up to v5 doesn't have.
E.g. the equaliser in DT can be used for denoising both chroma and luma, and dynamic range, and many other things. The LAB color curves are super powerful for all sorts of colour correction. Parametric masks allow powerful local-ish editing.
I'll have to try out this release.
It's a really good piece of software. Kudos to them for keeping up the good work.
If you're interested, you can see some of my photos at http://www.flickr.com/zerocoder
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsks-zRRM1ZVN_g7P6ZAs...
I love the concept of this being a digital darkroom where much artistic expression occurs long after taking an exposure.
Darktable's workflow better met my needs at the time I was picking between them. In particular, Darktable was better for processing a few hundred images in a couple of hours right after shooting. Darktable's integrated image management was the key difference. Darktable's ability to offload processing onto GPU's was also a factor. GPU's make Darktable much much faster than without.
I've got a photoshoot booked for tomorrow, so I'll try this out and see how it compares. (An average shoot for me results in 200-400 CR2 images to examine/reject/process.)
Darktable supports masks and parametric masks for almost all operations. RawTherapee on the other hand has a wider range of tools and support for profiles and raw formats.
But everybody is and forever will be comparing Darktable to Lightroom, so how about:
- Add to website a clear comparison vs Lightroom.
- Add to website how to import Lighroom catalogue.
Feature-wise, Lightroom is great - my main beefs with Lightroom are performance and stability: it's slow, and crashes occasionally.
What royally pisses me off with Adobe is that I now have pay them monthly to maintain access to my photo catalogue (edits/keywords/etc), but they don't use my moneys to improve their products.
I don't even remember when was the last useful new feature to either Photoshop or Lightroom, but I doubt it was within this decade.
The same images look great after importing into Lightroom and require very little post-processing.
I would love to drop my $expensive Adobe subscription, but this is the one issue that prevents me from doing so.
Obviously, if it's just a matter of applying the same adjustments to all imported images, that's very easy to do either while importing or after the fact.
It's slow as a hell. I don't understand why changing exposure on my 16 core i9 macbook takes up to 2-3 seconds for 24 mpix image. Same with zoom: 24 mpix image takes 3-4 seconds to zoom in/out! Really? How this software is written that simple actions are taking so much time? Enabling OpenCL helps, but not so much: changing exposure takes up to second (yes, 3-4 times faster) and zoom still 3-4. Meanwhile devs are spending time on css driven UI...
But UI is also unusable: it's very compact and many elements on a retina display are very close to each other, so I'm constantly miss-clicking them. Slider knobs are ridiculously small and hard to grab and drag. Numbers on controls can't be entered manually, so if you need some exact value you should spend seconds on dragging sliders until you get what you want.
Any other photo software are way ahead of this editor in terms of UI and performance, so I don't understand why this one gets so much attention.
Can you name a few open source ones? I'm not aware of any open source RAW development software that comes close.
https://www.darktable.org/about/faq/#faq-rename-files https://www.darktable.org/about/faq/#faq-filemanager
They even make it their April Fool's joke:
Also, can we use magnifying glass, instead of zooming in and scrolling the photo
ideally, would be select two photos to compare, click on compare side by side, and the two photos viewed on screen
https://userbase.kde.org/Digikam/LightTable
Sorry if that's not helpful to you, it might be useful to others though.
2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13261849
2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10789390
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10640753
(for the curious)
https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/search?q=cr3&type...
Congrats on the release!
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmsSn3fujI81EKEr4NLxrcg/vid...
If you don't know it, Darktable is awesome and unique. It often gets compared to Lightroom but it goes way beyond what that can do in many ways. It's main weakness is really that it maybe offers too many ways to do things. In addition to some easy to use filters it also offers many specialized filters and tools. Also, masking and parametric masking is vastly superior and that works on pretty much any tool.
Just the other day I decided to include Darktable in my yearly donations. Not a chance. They don't take donations :-)
Interestingly, one of the most annoying UI aspects of the program, the lack of label capitalization, is not present in the Russian translation. Everything is properly capitalized there.