How many photos can dt manage?

Software darktable
1

Hi!

I’m thinking of switching from Lightroom to Darktable. Lightroom manages now about 80,000 photos. Can DT 3.4.1 on Debian handle this amount?

2

Not sure the limit or how performance would be with crazy large numbers but DT does not import images into your database it essentially indexes them and you can have as many databases as you need so you can breakdown images that way to manage large numbers as well so let’s say you have two different companies you work for the you could have a database for each…Perhaps some one here can give you their experience… I have about 30000 or so images but I also don’t use DT database features I just use it to edit so I open it without the data base

3

Even more. I have only 56k images and all is fluid but I know some people with more than 100k pictures.

4

Thank you both!

5

just to manage expectations: darktable isn’t Lightroom. It doesn’t manage photos, it manages edits.
The photos are kept on your drive (internal or external as you prefer) and just the edits (or better the description of the editing steps) are stored in the database as well as the file location. So performance depends on your drives, at least when reaching cache limits.

6

Your welcome…ask away as you go…someone should have reasonable feedback for you on most issues. DT is quite a different beast than LR but if you invest the time you can get very nice results and at the same time have full control over most aspect of the UI and editing process. Because of its focus on scene referred editing there are some thing you need to get comfortable with and you will need to build your own style and presets if you need an advance starting position for your workflow…best of luck

7

That exactly the same with Lightroom.

8

Yes, indeed! At present DT takes me 10 times longer by worse results.

9

You do have the option to configure it for display referred and use a basecurve…this is an option to start with something closer to your JPG if you want or need that

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10

I have > 150.000 photos in dt and no issues at all

11

:+1:

12

402K+ in darktable production, ~90K in darktable master version for testing and playing. No problems with either

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13

Whaou ! First time I see a report with such amount of pictures. Great to see dt running without issue with such large picture set !

1 Like