Piece by piece I have moved away from Adobe products. I recently switched to darktable for RAW processing. I wish I discovered it sooner. I like it a lot. I am running darktable on a mac.
I am looking for a solution to import/rename and cull RAW files before I process then in darktable.
I was thinking about to FastRawViewer which looks to be great for RAW file viewing but it does not handle renaming files very well.
Photo mechanic is great but expensive.
What are folks using to import/rename and cull RAW photos that is cost effective?
To copy and rename my files, I use this exiftool script:
#!/bin/sh
#
# Requires exiftool
#
# Set $PHOTODIR, change to the directory with the photograhs you want to imort, then run this script.
PHOTODIR="~/Pictures/"
exiftool -r -o "${PHOTODIR}" "-FileName<CreateDate" -d "${PHOTODIR}/%Y-%m-%d/%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M-%S%%-c.%%le" .
When I mount my SD Card, I open a terminal, change to the folder (on a mac this would be something like cd /Volumes/NIKON D750), then run the script. It renames files to YYYY-MM-DD_H-M-S_originalfilame.ext. I prefer to keep all metadata in the XMP sidecar, so anything like a job number or code or tag would go in there.
If RPD is not an option for you try digikam then. It is definitely available for Mac. It can import from cameras, group raw+jpeg by filename, apply pick tags, color tags, keywords etc. If you set it to write to xmp sidecars it will share them with darktable. You won’t be able to see changes made in darktable unless you export to jpg though. It also has a very powerful batch processing manager. I never use it but some people even batch export raw to jpg while applying their favourite processing tools e.g. sharpening, lens correction etc.
The leader of the project has a Mac so I would guess the Mac version should be pretty polished.
I m trying to figure out how I integrate digikam with darktable. So perhaps digikam can function as my photo management and then send the image to darktable for processing and then export as tiff back to digikam?
This is how I do that. I export to jpeg not tiff though.
If you deal with raw only you might want to use just darktable though as it
can do tagging as well.
I use digikam because I have many jpegs as well as video files in my
collection.
There are many community members here using Geeqie for culling. Geeqie is
blazing fast but I am not sure if it is available on Mac.
I think they have homebrew as well as macports projects that might have
geeqie in the repos.
It might be also possible to compile Geeqie from sources ( I haven’t done
it though).
There’s also XnView MP (multi-platform), which is colour-managed, reads/writes XMP and IPTC data, has batch-renaming, and even supports some Ps plug-ins.
You might look into Irfanview using Winebottler. I run Irfaniew from Windows and Ubuntu, so cannot offer you specifics, but I would search online if you are interested. Irfanview is an awesome photo viewing, batch conversion/renaming ap that is free.