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Comment by virgilp | Hacker News Reader

Does anybody know a good photo management software that's not Lightroom? I don't actually need to do edits to my photos - I need to manage my photo library. Lightroom is not great at it but is passable - is there anything else? What I'm looking for is software that:

- Is fast

- Is capable of leaving photos where they are ("import-in-place").

- imports photos from card to NAS, organized by time ( year/month/day)

- allows me to make selections & export e.g. to Google Photos (exporting to a different local folder is good enough, I can setup google photos to sync, it's only slightly inconvenient).

- Ideally has good features for finding image duplicates, and maybe for searching.

- Keeps my photos locally/ doesn't insist on a cloud location.

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open source darktable is what I use.

http://www.darktable.org/

It’s fast

Leaves it in place

I think it can make collection, but not sure on this point

Not sure

It keeps files locally

Also it is open source ;)

While people seem to be replacing Photoshop with Affinity Photo and Lightroom with Capture One (elsewhere in the comments here, my own experience as well), I’m not sure what the best library focused tool is. Maybe look at comparisons of “digital asset management” or this image specific roundup: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_organizer#Notable_imag...

Photo Mechanic[0] is by far the best photo management software out there.

[0]https://home.camerabits.com/

Photo mechanic is great, you can import from a card and put the files on any mounted drive. You can set the import from a card to rename the files by date or other Exif info and into directories in the same way. It can browse directories without importing.

I don't think it can find duplicates, I typically I use a file duplicates tool for that type of thing.

Adobe's Bridge product also does some of this, but I haven't used that in a few years.

I've been following https://photoprism.org/ for a while (without taking the plunge yet, as I was waiting for the product to mature).

Not sure it covers all the features you need but worth mentioning: Spect[1] for macOS, frugal and fast.

1: https://stevenf.com/spect

While not as advanced retouching features as LR digikam matches the features you list. I have used it for more than 10 years and like it.

another os and locally installed solution: https://www.digikam.org/

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