Google Photos is amazing, but sorting photos in it is pretty lackluster. You can make albums... That's about it. It's sort of like Gmail; They want you to worry less about your complex organization system, and just use their fantastic search instead.
Which is beaten by even PostgreSQL’s fulltext search in 'simple' mode. (At least for my mails).
Hilariously bad.
I just searched for "James in the Mountains" and got photos of my Son in the mountains.
I don't think postgres can do that :-)
Presumably, if I wanted the web version, I would have started with the web version.
google thinks you're wrong. me too.
Additionally, in order to save the images I want how I created them, I'd have to pay a non-insubstantial amount of money to store them. By saving everything locally, I can have the full-resolution image for my own usage, and just pay the occasional cost to upgrade/replace hard drives.
Furthermore, I'm almost certainly going to have to have a copy of many of the images on my computer anyways. A lot of the images I make, I tend to want to share in 2 or more other places, not just a random web album. So again, the webapp usage story falls apart.
I'm also not always in a place where I have internet access which is particularly fast and reliable. So, needing a webapp in such a situation means that I can't edit and arrange my photos at all until I get to a location that has internet access. Not everyone wants to be hyperconnected all the time.
Webapps mean you're even more beholden to someone else for functionality than a desktop app. You are limited in how you can post your content, where you can post your content, and even what content you're allowed to post. A desktop application has none of these limitations, whereas they're inherent flaws in the webapp ecosystem.
"darktable is an open source photography workflow application and RAW developer. A virtual lighttable and darkroom for photographers. It manages your digital negatives in a database, lets you view them through a zoomable lighttable and enables you to develop raw images and enhance them."
Apps will be announced with huge fanfare (the most innovative thing ever), they'll show up in front of you without any action required on your part, they will change drastically in front of your eyes, corner cases will be buggy, and then in a few months to a couple of years they'll disappear forever.
yay, the future is almost here
This is where you are wrong. It is much easier catch and fix bugs in cloud software.
Separately, when on travel, a web connection for your photos may be very hard to find and/or expensive.
Separately, again, Google photos downscales my photos. My hard drive does not.
Why do you think we should only have shitty tools with bad accessibility and low quality?
At for example Smugmug.com you can have unlimited storage of original images with a VASTLY better UI for less than $4/mo.
90% of folks just want seamless backup and organization of their photos. Phone cameras are getting pretty amazing in quality these days. Google photos caters to that demand.
Lesson is: either pay for it, or support open source.
Require open source.
However, my own anecdotal evidence tells me that everything I've ever paid for and cared about is still in existence (even the crappy little utility-apps).
That's a far higher success rate than the company in question. And sure, there's a reason for that by the very nature of Google's business model and strategy. Doesn't mean I have to accept or like it.