I need to cull anything blurry or too blown and also duplicates. I am working through my back-catalog, so many folders have been merged and/or duplicated, photos have been misplaced, etc. I need to do this full-screen, probably dual-pane (or side-by-side windows) and I need full access to all sortable columns (size, dimensions, file extension, name, etc.) and easy preview (or large thumbnails). I’ve tried RawTherapee, Darktable and the built-in default file manager on my distro but none of them have the right features to speed up this process.
Yes, I have tried both before. Digikam definitely did not work for me. Geeqi has similar issues. I guess I’m probably looking more for a file manager and/or lightboard display
Rawtherapee’s ‘Inspect’ function in file browser mode is worth looking at if you haven’t tried it already. XnView MP is similar in concept to Geeqie but has more functionality, especially with regards to metadata. It isn’t open source though.
OK, I think I have a working solution to this for now, using two apps.
1 - XnView - the bulk rename works extremely well. Using a template very easy to change files ending in (1) to just 001. This solved one of my main issues, as I kept seeing photos out of place in sequence and thinking they were duplicates. XnView does a good job of finding duplicates as well, even though the interface for choosing and deleting one of each is a bit wonky.
2 - Darktable - the interface isn’t quite as intuitive as I’d like, but a small investment of time in reading some manual pages pays off. In lighttable mode I can handle the metadata - attach or detach tags, add titles and descriptions in bulk. Once in the darkroom mode, the space bar advances one photo, backspace goes back one. To select an image to be removed you use the ‘r’ key. I can easily apply base curve presets manually or apply them in bulk during import. That right there is the main feature I’ve been trying to find and use over the last month.
Having said that, the ability to export to Flickr seems to be broken. I’ve found bug reports 18 months old on this. Guess I need to try to duplicate all of these same things with RawTherapee…
Using these two apps, in this order, should give me the bulk
Personally, I use the file system in the form of folders to do all that. Any image viewer that is colour managed (bonus: could customize stuff like the colour of the interface [to make the viewing neutral] and shortcut keys) and could quickly move images to various folders (including the trash or recycle bin) is good.
It allows to customize interface, e.g. I customized by tool bar for touch screen (added pick label “rejected”, added “Remove”, “Move” etc. Which allows me to do culling, sorting while I am on a go (on a plane). Digikam also has fuzzy search but I have never used it myself. It also has batch queue manager that allows to apply tools like base curve, sharpen, etc. on multiple images but I have never used it myself either.