Serious question: Is there any good photo management software? I’m not even a hobbiest photographer but I’ve got 300GB of photos over 15 years, and it’s a pain in the ass to manage these.
I tried Lightroom, but that was excruciatingly slow to import the photos, and on top of that it had very counter intuitive controls. It was also not cheap at all, and subscription based.
I tried Google Photos (my current setup), but while cloud storage is nice, it’s UI sucks (it is Google after all), but most annoyingly you can’t actually name people in photos. Instead you have to wait for the face to get processed, then peruse 1000 faces of strangers just to find the face (hopefully) and then assign a name for it. Seriously, I can’t name my daughter in any picture taken in the last 2 years because of this.
Apple Photos seems like the product I most want, but it insists that all the photos get stored locally, which is a nonstarter. Its cloud storage doesn’t make any sense because it seems like sync, which never what I want. Finally, it barfs if you try to import too many pictures at once.
I’ve been using python scripts to manages my photos, but I’d really like good graphical manager that supports geo and face tagging, maybe some of the event stuff like Google Photos. Does anyone else have this problem? I can’t believe I’m the only one with these problems, but at the same time it’s hard for me to see a niche market for this. Any thought?
I forgot to mention that DT support lua scripting[1] which might help you to further automate some steps of your photo management process.The Lua API is fairly complete.
You can also grap some existing lua plugin like the one who can export/import to GIMP.
They're all poor in some way. Lightroom is closest, especially with the latest uodate to improve speed in the Classic CC version.
Other than that there are exceptional importers like Photomechnic ($$$) or Rapid Photo Downloader (free) but photo managers are all poor.
Its unbelievable too. All it needs is a free version of lightrooms librart module that works on the embedded raw jpegs (like Photomechnic and Rapid Photo Downloader) and it would win photo management.
Im learning to code with part of the motivation being I'm going to make my own that actually works because its so easy to see whats needed. By next christmas i hooe to have a rough first working attempt.
I'm using a mix DT and Flickr for photo management. The import feature of DT is pretty decent and you can choose the folders structure you want. Once imported, I'm using tags extensively to categorize my photos. You can even automatically apply tags to imported photos.
Later, I export all my processed photos to Flickr[1] (1TB of space for free) and use their albums, tags, geolocation features to categorize them further. By processed photos, I mean photo I have reworked with DT (so not all my pictures, but the ones that really matter).
I'm the reverse - I want to manage the location and organization of my images 100% manually. I have a good work-flow of copying RAW files to
~/Images/$year/$location/$event/raw
Exported JPGs go to "$event/jpg" and it makes it easy to find. I've never used darktable, instead I use rawtherapee which allows me to work with images in my own preferred locations without wanting to "import" or "copy" to some internal database.
I believe it's much more convenient to have a tree like ~/photos/$year/$month.$day-$event/[raw|jpg]/$YYYY.MM.DD-hh.mm.ss.[raw|jpg]
Especially handy when you need to mix your photos with someone else's (I add -$author to photo name). I wrote a simple script to rename photos to this pattern based on EXIF info. Works pretty well (just ensure the time is set correct).
I simplified a little. My full hierarchy looks like:
~/Images/$year/$month/$day-title/{ RAW JPG Public }
RAW contains all the RAWs, JPG for processed results, and Public for any images that are shared publicly, as opposed to given to paid clients or kept for my own use/reference.
This is fine and all, but Darktable offers no 'ease of use' when actually operating on those nicely organised images.
You can do exactly what you just said with PhotoMechanic, or Rapid Photo Downloader, and still open lightroom and navigate the file structure.
Trying that with Darktable is a pain. It wants you to import and the file sytem browser is poor.
Plus, are you going to edit all the photos you've downloaded? Are you not going to rate, discard, reorganise the keepers, tags and sort etc etc? Darktable is leagues behind lightroom in this capability, not to mention noise handling, camera specific tone curves and speed of use.
It is a powerful editor, but its setup for hobbyists and tinkerers who go from file to file and repeat every single step manually. The batch processing is convoluted and at my last try pretty inflexible.for example.
Yeah as I mentioned in my original comment I use "rawtherapee" instead. Which doesn't try to take ownership of any directories, import, etc. It just lets you work with the existing structure.
I don't necessarily edit every picture, but I want to look at white-balance, and similar things, for every shot in a specific session. (Most of the time I can replicate settings from one image to the next - when I'm using studio-strobes the lighting doesn't change.)
The only images I outright delete are those where a model blinks mid-shot, or a strobe fails to fire. In an hour-session I might have 750 images, and I'll likely rank/rate all of them, but only export 20% to JPG, and then those will be pruned as I decide which are the good ones.
I was excitedly looking for how they manage this, but alas, it looks like not well :(
Is there any tools nowadays that:
(a) Lets the user keep Favorited/marked images in a local storage location
(b) 'ages-out' other files to secondary storage pools (removable disks, cloud storage)
(c) Keeps Low-res thumbnails of all images in the collection?
I keep trying to find something that would help keep tabs on a growing collection of images, with growing file sizes from newer cameras, but it all seems like doing it manually is the only way to go :(
For my workflow, I copy from the camera SD card to an external HDD, then import to Darktable from there. It stores its thumbnails and database under my home directory, and I can ensure it has thumbnails and medium-resolution previews of all photos with `darktable-generate-cache`. On any photo, I can click "copy locally" [1], and it syncs it to my internal SSD so I can edit without the HDD plugged in.
In no way is Darktable a photo manager. At all. In any way.
Its a raw editor only and the docs are clear about this. To edit some files you have to import them, but importing them is for the sole ourpose of performing raw edits. There's some rudimentary tagging/rating abilities but the sorting capabilities are poor and you cant actually reorganise files on disk.
Theres no way you'd import say 20,000 photos (or in my case about 100,000) and keep a catelogue. You'd have to split it into individual shoots/days to get any kind of performance (thats if importing that many wouldnt crash it, it did previously).
They only grudgingly include a file system browser which is also hobbled.
If Darktable actually included photo management as a first class citizen (by that i simply mean even just a simple file browser like lightroom has) it would probably win this particular software space. But the devs choose to actively work against that functionality so its just another minor free app.
Assuming I already wrote a shell script that does this, what else about Darktable's file management is going to annoy me when I try it on the three hundred or five hundred or a thousand images I'll bring home after a busy day of shooting?
Yeah, this is where Lightroom really does well at. For a good photo workflow you not only need something that can process raws but also let you deal with 500+ images in a manner where you don't spend hours culling/sorting.
