Hi @anarcat, I’m in a similar situation, with a huge backlog because in the past I used the raw developer of the manufacturer of my camera and this stopped working well for me when I got a different body. Perhaps you will find some of the following points useful.
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On Linux, I am not aware of a more efficient culling solution than geeqie. Personally, I shoot a lot in continuous drive, so I typically keep only 5% of the shots or so. Geeqie is very snappy, and allows to quickly switch back and forth between subsequent images, on any zoom level. I like to enable “show marks” mode and toggle mark 1 for the pictures that I’d like to keep. When all have been marked, I let geeqie select all the marked ones and move them to a directory on the computer. I delete the rest directly using geeqie as well, right on the card. This way, the pictures on my sdcards correspond to the images that haven’t been culled yet.
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I began using digicam for viewing/searching my collection. I first wanted to use darktable for this purpose, but digicam seems better suited for this purpose. In particular, images do not need to be imported explicitly. New images simply show up, deleted ones disappear. In my opinion the workflow for tagging, rating and searching of photos is somewhat better in digikam. I configured digikam such that its database only acts as a cache. Modification are only written to XMP files both for RAWs and for JPEGs. I use the following shell alias to “transplant” XMP metadata into JPEGs whenever I want:
alias xmp-transplant="parallel -X 'exiftool -tagsfromfile %d%f.%e.xmp -xmp:all -ignoreMinorErrors -overwrite_original {.} && rm {.}.xmp' ::: ". This way, the JPEGs and RAWs are only ever modified explicitly, and I can keep them in git-annex. -
It took me a lot of time, but finally (with what will be darktable 4.2) I succeeded in crearing a simple default style that gives good results for most of my photography. I have many images that I’d like to keep for record, but that do not justify a lot of manual editing. The common advice in this case would be to simply keep the out-of-camera JPEGs, but I prefer if all of my photos go through the same pipeline and have a consistent look. In addition, shooting RAW only is faster/uses less storage.
In darktable, by default, I apply “hot pixels” and “lens correction” to all images, together with a custom “exposure” (for my camera, I set the exposure to +1 EV by default). This is a good starting point for further edits, but I now also have a “default” style that adds slightly custom “filmic” (black point to -8 EV, white point to + 3.5 EV), “local contrast” (set to defaults), “color balance” (set to “basic colorfulness: standard”), and “denoise” (set as suggested here: Possible to achieve good basic chroma noise reduction with a preset? - #20 by priort). I find that this gives good results in many cases, often already much better than the camera JPEG.
Geeqie would allow to address the last three of these points. As for the first, isn’t it sufficient to add JPEGs and RAWs to git-annex only from time to time? As for the second, darktable can be launched directly from digikam or from the desktop file manager. It’s quick to launch it on a whole directory of fresh RAWs (select all and then “open in darktable”).