Comment by randomstate

9 hours ago

Ditched Adobe Lightroom 10+ years ago in favour of Darktable and never looked back. It was the first FOSS software, which showed me how green the grass can get.

12 comments

randomstate

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ghostly_s  9 hours ago

Don't lead people down a fruitless path. From their own FAQ:

>Is darktable a free Lightroom alternative?¶ Yes and no. Darktable is an alternative to Lightroom the same way any other raw editor is, since it edits raw files, but it would be a mistake to think it’s a direct replacement. Other than both being raw editors with photo library management, and looking somewhat similar, they have very little in common.

What they mean is, Darktable has very capable editing functionality, but its "library management" is such an afterthought that I would challenge whether it even deserves to be called library management. It seems to be oriented around the design philosophy that photographers should be organizing their library with CLI tools.

  • donatzsky  3 hours ago

    As the one responsible for writing much of the FAQ, I can assure you that's not what is meant. The point is to hopefully make new users aware that they can't assume their Lightroom knowledge will help them, and thus encourage them to consult the manual or some tutorials. It's an unfortunate fact that many coming from Lightroom think they already know everything and don't have to learn anything new, but when they fail to make head or tails of darktable they conclude that the issue is that it's trash and not that they didn't bother educating themselves - and they will often loudly proclaim this on Reddit in a rather entitled manner.

    But yes, the library features could do with some improvements.

  • Mashimo  8 hours ago

    When I still used it, I only ever opened the folder with the files I wanted to edit.

    I had folders based on dates YYYY.MM.DD - Eventname. No need for cli.

    I still do the same now for CaptureOne to be honest.

    • Arainach  6 hours ago

      That's not library management, and it's not a replacement for Lightroom/C1.

      "If you give up on these features, it's a replacement" doesn't make it a replacement.

      3 replies →

pnut  9 hours ago

Pretty sure Darktable only supports openCL and not Metal for MacOS.

OpenCL is unsupported for M1/2/3/4/5, which makes RAW file processing, batch workflows, basically everything, unusably slow.

Unless something has changed in the past few months, Darktable is dead on MacOS with no fix in sight.

  • donatzsky  3 hours ago

    OpenCL is deprecated, not unsupported, on MacOS and may be removed at some point, but it absolutely does still work for now. If you don't have OpenCL acceleration, it's a bug.

  • wizzledonker  8 hours ago

    I use it on Mac - I didn’t notice too much. There’s some GPU usage, I assume Apple still has some deprecated OpenCL drivers kicking around that it knows to use.