Of course. Digikam is like a Swiss army knife, not only let you tag media (not only photos), manage filesystem (create/move/delete folders not only files) and apply in batch mode anything you can do with ShowPhoto (its destructive photo editor), but you can do search in (even MariaDB) database by tags, filenames, folders names, time, photo size, formats … and do it very well.
Darktable it’s a headache when you make any change to filenames, folder names or delete files (outside it) . User needs to launch scripts to make Darktable notice that there are changes in some folder. In Digikam this can be done automatically or forced by user within Digikam.
I consider Darktable is more RAW operations oriented, but lacks on filesystem management.
I share this standpoint. On my side I feel that now dt is enough easy to use to manage properly all my structured tags, categories or other needed metadata, including what I want to export or not.
I agree that Digikam has more DAM features, but they are not useful for me. And moreover I totally dislike the permanent constraints and duplication of information related to the different xmp idioms. Kind of babel tower.
I agree that dt could be better on this. So I don’t change them outside dt.
I have a doubt about Digikam (or any other DAM), guess this is a good thread to ask. Since digikam cannot show all the edits done to the raw file in dt, I will have to export all as jpegs. Now, does digikam keep a link between the raw and the jpeg? While browsing through the jpegs, if I right click and say “edit”, will it open up the correct raw file in dt?
No: as far as I know, even grouping them will not help, as digikam always opens the active file for editing (in this case, the jpg). Otoh, if you open the raw file for editing with darktable, it will continue where you left off the last time
As @rvietor wrote, when you tell Digikam to open a JPG file will open it, not the related RAW. Remember Digikam is not a RAW editor in the way Darktable is.
Ohh. Seems I’m confused about how to use the DAM then. It’s only for managing the exported jpgs, and not the raw files? Part of my problem is that I’m coming from Lightroom, which had excellent dam functionality for the raw files.
I’m 72. I have terabytes of raw images. Most of it is crap. I’m not interested in importing it all.
I keep raws in a hierarchy with dates and descriptive folder names.
I browse thumbnails with geeqie. If I see one I like I can spawn darktable directly from geeqie. That way darktable has sidecar files only for interesting images. Any finished png or jpeg always has the first part of the raw file name in it, so both can be found at any time.
PIC_1234.nef might become PIC_1234_Reddish-egret.jpg
…which might reside in:
mypics/Birds/Texas/Aransas/Feb_23_2018/raw1/darktable_exported
Geeqie doesn’t run on Windows but there must be an equivalent (browse thumnails, have the ability to send any chosen thumbnail (of a raw) to any other external program).
I think I made close to 200 exposures this day. I ended up with 3 or 4
interesting images. Why import frass into darktable?
We all have our own ways. I prefer do do photo-culling with geeqie. I can vary the thumbnail size as needed. I can see thumbnails and a larger version of the currently selected image simultaneously. I can cntrl-click to select blocks of frass images and delete them all at once.
Once done with my digital contact sheet I then import what’s left into Darktable.
Backups? I mirror /home (on linux) with rsync. I’m looking into git annex, which looks promising
The import is not the problem.
But - I like to set darktable to use half-sized RAW to display in lighttable. And this - at least on my computers - is too slow to do culling.
So I also use geeqie as a second step (rapid photo downloader is the first as it also generates a backup). I move images I want to keep to a folder presorted and delete the rest.
This folder is imported to darktable to edit those images, do the tagging etc. and shift them to the related project folders etc. - all within darktable with the tools available there.
