God said: free software "is not made" to do as well as commercial software.

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Good morning all.
First of all, thank you to everyone who volunteered their computer skills to serve the digital photographers community!
I have been a professional photographer for 30 years and have been using digital cameras since the early 2000s.
This is to say that I have a little experience in the practice of photography and that I know a little about the real needs of a professional photographer.
I use a computer with Mac for photography and another with Linux (Mint) for everything else and I dream of one day being able to do everything on Linux.
Since I started using digital cameras, I have used successively, for the processing of my images: Aperture (Mac), Aftershot Pro (Linux) then Lightroom (Mac) and currently Capture One Pro (Mac).
However, all these software allow the batch renaming of photos (and before, of course, their sorting and rating) as well as the affixing of sufficiently complete captions.
So I am genuinely flabbergasted (and disappointed) when I read comments on forums dedicated to software like Digikam or Rawtherapee (and therefore ART) which emphatically assert that RAW processing software “is not made for” batch rename photos or to allow captioning images.
Is that so ?..
And why this ?
Was it god who said that when he created the earth?
Bill Gates?
George Soros? ')
Frankly, I do not understand this way of wanting at all costs to restrict free software and make it less attractive than commercial software, in the name of so-called purism which personally would rather make me think of a kind of fundamentalism.
So, the answer that I have already been given on French forums is that I only have to use in addition to Dartable or Rawtherapee (and now Art) software like Digikam or XNview.
It’s a joke ?
In addition to the fact that these software are remarkable for the ugliness of their interface (worthy of the 90s), they are real “gas factories” (usines à gaz" in french), the prize going to Digikam with its icons and illegible texts and its vertical menus.
Lightroom, Capture One Pro and other software allow you to do these essential operations while they are RAW processing software.
And I believe that the leaders of Adobe or Phase Ose are not really weirdos or complete morons.
I think it wouldn’t take much for many photographers to take a serious interest in Linux and software like ART or Dartable.
But for that, it would be necessary that those who carry these projects stop blustering and looping that RAW processing software “is not made for” to do what all commercial software can do…
Hello from Nice!

Hi, welcome to the forum.

What is free software?

Hi,
? …
I do not understand the question.

Let me help. Free software is software for which you pay nothing to use. There’s no contract for a good or service in exchange for a consideration of value, so you basically get whatever is offered, nothing more.

The developers of these programs have their own priorities with regard to what’s needed to produce good images. That they haven’t considered batch renaming or image captioning isn’t a deficiency, they’re just not high on their particular lists of things to do. My observation after participating here for a few years is that they’re generally willing to listen and consider, and often-times implement with responsiveness you’ll not get trying to correspond with Adobe developers.

A bit of graciousness will go a long way. And really, welcome to the forum!

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I think that @gadolf is hinting to you that the developers of these free software packages are free to design them as they see fit, and similarly you are free to modify them as you see fit or develop your own to suit your needs.

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in addition, ART allows you to manage scripts that could probably do that very well …

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Though it would be a useful capability, is batch renaming your files in Finder on Mac not a reasonable solution? I use the free program name changer to batch Rename. Doesn’t require multiple photography programs…

Or are we talking about batch renaming upon import, referencing exif data, etc? If this is the case I would submit that Rapid Photo Downloader does this job extremely well. I used Lightroom for over a decade, and always used outside tools for batch renaming since I didn’t like its abilities there.

I’ve witnessed time and again here that if you have a clearly stated idea and a need, developers on this forum are very responsive. Blanket criticisms about looks get less traction.

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What’s wrong with having one software for A and another for B? I once used another software (forgot which one, was free though) for batch renaming. (I recall with a bit of fiddling IrfanView can do that too).

I don’t think one needs all sort of possible functions in one software (and then we complain it’s bloated).

And I don’t get the OpenSource/Commercial Software rant. Both are there to work for me. I also use (paid) Affinity Photo. Some functions I have in darktable I don’t get in Affinity.

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These ththypes of posts are honestly my least favorite: overly dramatic, entitled, and whiney.

In 10 seconds of googling, you’d have found that digiKam can do this: Digikam/Renaming Photos - KDE UserBase Wiki

Darktable has good capacity to rename files at export.

Rapid Photo Downloader can rename flexibly at import.

Exiftool/exiv2 amd your shell will rename files however you want.

Stop dreaming and start doing.

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@Eric_de_Nice First of all, welcome!

Open software is composed of an assortment of priorities and desires. So, its weakness can be that it is specialized in one area and lacking in another.

Where you are getting it wrong is that open software isn’t behind the curve but ahead of it. What I mean by that is over the past 20 years we have seen the app-ification of software, where we see more and more small specialized and focused apps that are great at what they do. Sure, good ones have good integration, import and export facilities, but they follow the open source way of being in niche categories.

Lean software is good because it runs faster and is easier to debug and customize. I use a free app that does renaming spectacularly. Why use tag-on code on a dinosaur when I can use something more robust and clean?

Think of the rhino that is Adobe. It goes full speed and weight ahead but if you noticed over the same two decades it has admitted to us that it is too heavy by continuously releasing light experimental paradigm shifting touch based apps that in a decade may supplant its ACR / PS / LR heavy hitters.

In sum, it is just a matter of approach and flexibility on the part of the user. As it is written

You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

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The moment you understand right away that the rest of the post is going to be bullshit indelicate …

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So, that means that Linux and free software in general are absolutely not made for the general public but for computer scientists who can if they want, modify the software as they want. Digital multinationals therefore still have a bright future ahead of them …

Next time I will tell you then that I am a beginner in photography and have absolutely no idea what a professional photographer needs and how to work.
Like that, you will find everything I say very well and you will be happy to teach me about digital life …

@Eric_de_Nice

God said: free software “is not made” to do as well as commercial software

Which god, and how can you know that?

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Salut Eric, this is how you should have approached it:

Hi, I am Eric and am a photographer for the last 30 or so years (Yeah, I’ve been in the dark room). Check out my portfolio [link].

I just started using free software photography programs and they work really well (some might need some polishing or a fix here and there) but I can do all my work in them! I just realized most of them don’t have a batch renaming option, why is that? How do you go about dealing with this, any hints? Is there a way to request this feature?

Cheers from Nice!

But instead you chose the entitled route which will probably get you nowhere.

Hello from Brazil!

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the daemon.god

May I add some thoughts about both sides approaches?

First, I understand what the OP is asking for (without too much politeness), because I’ve been eager about the same thing. It’s just a matter of efficiency and convenience: if I’m sorting and renaming my images, I prefer to do it in my raw processor (just like I did it in Lightroom). It’s not that I can’t do it in «putthenameofyourpreferredapplicationhere», but just that my preference is to do it in my raw processor. I like it better, that’s it.

Now, the other side: pretty quickly I realized that free software is driven by individuals in their spare time, without money involved, and with given knowledge in programming.

Above it, most of the time those applications we use and love are created and maintained by just a bunch of people, that may or may not have experience in GUI programming or the infamous UX design. Most of the time they don’t.

So honestly, even if I would love to have such feature in a raw program, I can’t ask them to implement it, because they do what they do, and I have to be grateful for that.

Those things I can’t find in a raw developer, I can find them in other apps (specially in the linux world).

There is nothing dramatic or whiny about what I am saying.
I am simply making remarks, criticisms.
But apparently criticism is not really welcome in the free world, at least for some people.
You tell me about doing a “in 10 seconds” search (like I’m simple-minded) on Google to find out how to batch rename with Digikam.
But I know very well that we can rename in batch with the gas plant that is Digikam.
But what’s important to me (and a lot of photographers) is being able to sort, select, rename, and process photos in the same software and be fast and efficient.
You tell me (I have already been told) that “Darktable has good capacity to rename files at export.”.
Maybe, but what I want to be able to do is also rename the RAWs and not just the exported images, so that my clients get JPEGs (for example) that have the same denominations as the corresponding RAWs that I keep in my computer.
I do not see what there would be delusional in what I am saying here …
You also say that “Rapid Photo Downloader can rename flexibly at import.”.
Maybe but this software which I downloaded yesterday to try it does not allow to view large images and to mark them to select them to be renamed afterwards in batch.
So, with this software, I am no more advanced …
You also tell me about the possibilities to rename the photos in batch with my system’s file browser.
But again, there is the same limitation as with Rapid Photo Downloader.
So yes, maybe I should “stop dreaming and start (or rather continue) doing” … with Capture One Pro! ')

I agree with what you say about people who volunteer free software development.
But I do not understand that others, followers of this software, do not support that it is pointed out that this or that function is missing which exists in the equivalent commercial software and which exist in this software because, in all likelihood, users needed it …