I desperately want to switch from lightroom but darktable isn’t even close to being an efficient replacement for quickly sorting through, tagging and editing a day’s shooting of 50mp raw files.
It’s an order of magnitude slower and with way more clicks to do anything
Are you using assisted culling in Lightroom for culling? As yeah, thats just missing from Darktable and you would have to use another (opensource) tool to do that.
However if you are still manual, I dont agree once you have learned the keyboard shortcuts, that’s as fast for me in both, or in my current tool of choice, photolab. Even just using 1 to 5 to do basic culling with auto advance is a game changer for manual review.
Editing really depends on your workflow, if you have a lot of similar shots you can just copy and paste a working set across everything thats similar and then manually tweak. Even if the shots aren’t the same just applying the usual set of modules with some sensible defaults across photos is very helpful. I used to keep one back from my last set as a template.
I’ve started several attempts to migrate to it, and they’ve all failed. The workflow just doesn’t work for me. It’s extremely click-heavy and (subjectively) unintuitive. (I want to delete a file. Why TF can’t I just use Del to do that?)
Lightroom is the single Windows application that I still haven’t successfully replaced with a FOSS alternative. It’s confined to a Windows VM with no internet access. That’s fine for now.
Why not just use Darktable?
I desperately want to switch from lightroom but darktable isn’t even close to being an efficient replacement for quickly sorting through, tagging and editing a day’s shooting of 50mp raw files.
It’s an order of magnitude slower and with way more clicks to do anything
DigiKam is more for cataloging and DarkTable is better for editing
Yeah I don’t sort or tag with DarkTable I only edit.
Are you using assisted culling in Lightroom for culling? As yeah, thats just missing from Darktable and you would have to use another (opensource) tool to do that.
However if you are still manual, I dont agree once you have learned the keyboard shortcuts, that’s as fast for me in both, or in my current tool of choice, photolab. Even just using 1 to 5 to do basic culling with auto advance is a game changer for manual review.
Editing really depends on your workflow, if you have a lot of similar shots you can just copy and paste a working set across everything thats similar and then manually tweak. Even if the shots aren’t the same just applying the usual set of modules with some sensible defaults across photos is very helpful. I used to keep one back from my last set as a template.
I’ve started several attempts to migrate to it, and they’ve all failed. The workflow just doesn’t work for me. It’s extremely click-heavy and (subjectively) unintuitive. (I want to delete a file. Why TF can’t I just use Del to do that?)
Lightroom is the single Windows application that I still haven’t successfully replaced with a FOSS alternative. It’s confined to a Windows VM with no internet access. That’s fine for now.
I am not saying this will work for you, but I am leaving it here for others as it does work for me when doing mass edits.
https://docs.darktable.org/usermanual/3.8/en/lua/api/