It has been a while since my previous post. Had to overcome some hurdles. Some my own, some LR pecularities. But I’m a very happy camper here!
Started this project mid january this year out of frustration over LR. It took me a couple of weeks to clean up the remnants of 15+ years of work – both in hdd-folders and in Lightroom. Rewrote my process in the meanwhile. I’ve imported a bit more then 100.000 dng’s and around 30.000 jpeg and heic files. Most of it keyworded and geotagged.
Worst part was the cleaning up – of my own ‘mess’. Second worst was the way LR handles hierarchy and produces ‘loose’ keywords beside the hierarchy. Cleaned up de dng files manually. Exiftool came to my rescue regarding the jpeg’s and heic files. Found out that the representation of keywords in jpeg and heic files is a bit different. Long story short represented in 4 Exiftool commandlines…:
(a) Exiftool -subject= -ext jpg -r .
(b) Exiftool -keywords= -ext jpg -r .
(c) Exiftool -subject= -ext heic -r .
(d) Exiftool -WeightedFlatSubject= -ext heic -r .
The ’.’ on the end of the command is important, as is starting exif from the right folder – namely the top of the folder hierachy – using the ‘-r’ switch to process subfolders as well. Very straight forward (once I found out how to do it).
I’m now - so to speak - ‘learning to walk’ again as darktable is very different from LR. As said before I prefer darktable as it gives me way more processing possibilities. Though I’m getting ‘the hang of it’ I still have to get more acquainted to the use cases of darkroom modules. Have made a list of preferred darkroom modules and nicely organised them into my own tab.
A side effect of this darktable project is that I’ve left MS Office and now use LibreOffice and Thunderbird. I probably will migrate to Linux from Windows as well. But that is not yet decided. And I do hope shortly starting printing my own work again….
To conclude: many, many thanks to all who participate(d) in developing darktable. As well as to the youtube channel makers@s7habo, @Bruce_Williams , @Andy_Astbury1 and @nwinspeare - to name a few - whose videos help(ed) me a great lot.
Re; migrating to linux, if you can first move all your apps over to open source ones that run on both windows and linux, get comfortable with those apps first, then moving to linux will be way less of a minefield.
Yes, that’s sound advice. Frankly I’m nearly there already, left MS Office and Outlook, left Adobe prog’s, use Firefox and I’ve found it no trouble at all. So I do not see big problems there, only benefits. Migration to darktable was by far the biggest leap.
I’ve already one hdd freed of data and plan to move windows and programs there. Then I will install a linux of choice on my fast 1TB ssd C:\ drive.
I think after making proper backups and restore points not much will stand in my way.
Very interesting. I have to study your EXIFtool advice.
I am just starting with darktable under Windows 10, after 15 years of Lightroom.
My plan is the following:
1.) replace lightroom by darktable under Windows 10. There seems to be alot of guidelines and manuals for this step on the web.
2.) Move darktable, with all photos and databases, to Linux. Is there any advice for this step ? I am afraid that there is a chnace to ,oose a lot of work in this step.
I’ve recently heard of another open-source alternative, OnlyOffice.
They start their licence with strange wording (‘freeware’), but maybe it’s only there for those more familiar with that term:
This program is freeware. You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNUAffero(???)General Public License (AGPL) version 3 as published by the Free Software Foundation.
They promise better compatibility with MS Office, if that’s a concerned. I have installed it, but thankfully don’t have to work with office tools at home – when I do, it’s usually something trivial, for which Google Docs is enough. The company laptop has MS Office, ‘of course’.
Hi Thomas, I’m on Win11 64bits now. And planning to move Windows to another hdd. When that is successful I will use my ssd for Linux. and migrate most of my app’s to it. I feel - it should be a project but that’s not how i proceed - I will need a couple of weeks to figure it out and execute…
I do not think the chance for losing data is that big - provided back-ups and restore points being there.
My experience migrating from Lr to darktable is ok’ish. The proces is not difficult. It took me time to clean up my own files. And it took time to figure out what to do with LR destroying my keyword hierarchy. Do not know in what situation you are. Could you elaborate on that? For instance: structure of your photofolders, kind and number of photofiles. But maybe even more important your use of flags, stars, labels and keywords in LR …
What I’ve done is testing a lot of import cycles in darktable and throwing it (the database) away (by renaming it) when the results where not as expected/wanted and tweaking was necessary. Importing dealt both with the keywordstructure as the pictures.
Thanks @kofa , this might be interesting for a lot of migrators… For the time being LibreOffice is what I need and fulfills my - not to big/deep - desires
The wording may be a bit funny, but the Affero license is basically there for the server part: it means the source code for the server must also be made available when someone forks the application (the standard GPL only concerns distributed binaries, and when you connect to a server, you don’t get its binaires).
The most interesting part of that suite, compared to LibreOffice, seems to me the collaborative options (in case you need those)
