As we finish 2022, I thought it would be nice to share our favorite image(s) from the year and a few stats!
In 2022, I imported 252 photos into darktable.
I made zero five start images.
Five four star images.
53 three star images.
Here is my favorite of the year:
Looking forward to seeing yours!
A year of two halves for me. I was enjoying some time off work in the first half of 2022 and took 18 trips out with my camera, taking nearly 1900 images. Since I started my new job, I’ve been too busy with other things and I haven’t taken my camera out since my summer holiday in July. I currently have 411 images tagged as “to be processed” (213 from this year).
Favourite image of the year… that’s a hard one, but I guess this one makes as good a summary of 2022 as any…
Edit: I couldn’t resist the temptation to continue the theme and also include a photo of some fly-tipped rubbish I found…
Currently I’m not a stats guy. My pick at least as much annoyed me before I pressed the button, as i like the result now.
Very good idea - even if I find it difficult! I have 764 images with 4 stars in dt from the last year… and very few with 5 stars.
I struggle to pick the best ones, until later, by which time I’ve forgotten about them 
Here’s my pick. I call it No Humans Allowed.
P.S. I’ve just done a bit more poking around in dt… I imported 20388 RAW images into dt last year! 
My keeper rate doen’t seem very high does it…
This is a recent one, but a happy finish for the year on the French Riviera: we finally had some rain, and life restarted in the ground. I call this Mushrooms in a wheat field.
It’s just a garden-size field and wheat is very young and small… Lentil is growing in the middle of all that.
Best wishes!
Choosing a favourite image is a bit hard, but this image of Finnish summer night with noctilucent clouds and reflections on a rocky hill is one of my favourites, so let’s go with that one. I made three versions out of this, and this is not the most natural one, but the one I like the most visually.
One Favourite?! ONE?! 
There are plenty still to be culled, but I got some nice shots of the surf from Tropical Cyclone Seth on 3 January last year.
I’ve never checked how many photos I took in a year before. Just not a stats guy I guess. Did a find|wc -l for raw files in my 2022 folder and the following number popped out which is less than the previous year.
12003
Those are only culled for obvious misses/useless shots and contain small composition/timing duplicates of the same scene . I have uploaded about 2000 images for sharing on various websites.
I find it difficult to pick favourites and those would be unsuitable for me to share anyway because they would either be of people I don’t want to share on the open internet or of projects where they are used for specific circumstances.
Here’s a favorite of my 2022:
One thing I learned to love this year is portraits of my loved ones. I don’t share these online, though, so that’s not something I can show here.
In total, I shot some 11k images, of which I picked 3k images, awarded 1200 three stars (“good”), and 38 four stars (“great”). Five stars I only ever award retroactively, for images I come back to time and again.
Is this in absolute or relative terms? I like some of my shots more (or less) than others, but none of them absolutely.
I took about 15,000 photos last year and wound up with about 800 that I rated worthwhile at 3 stars or higher. Of those I rated around 250 with 5 stars, which I use to track what I’ve finished and posted.
I came across this Pileated Woodpecker last November. He must have sensed the day was a bust for me because he landed about 10 feet in front of me. I actually had to step back in order to get him in my FOV with my long lens.
They’re normally very shy and won’t allow you anywhere near them, even if they’re high up in a tree. So he wasn’t frightened of me at all. That, or he was really hungry.
I did the edits on darktable and I found the white balance controls on Color Calibration were extremely helpful in dealing with a difficult color cast. Diffuse and Sharpen performed well in getting just the right detail as well.
I don’t think it matters? The constraint is that it was shot in 2022 and was the image you liked the most. I guess that is relative. I don’t know.
oh, that’s very different from how I use a star rating!
For me:
5 star = portfolio image, there are ~20 images with a 5 star rating, so a new 5 star generally has to displace an old 5 star
4 star = really nice, but not a 5 star
3 star = Good enough to share on social media, if I did that kind of thing
2 star = old edit where there is something else better than it
1 star = why is this here?
I cull in geeqie, so most shots don’t even make it into darktable.
