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Comment by Maakuth | Hacker News Reader

Are these applications really adding so much value that it's worth it with their proprietary catalogs? My personal solution for photo storage is a normal directory tree with files. I have Piwigo set up to catalog those so that I can browse by shooting date and tags, but the file hierarchy stays untouched. I can pull files from there to edit with any application and there's a lot of proven tools to keep the files in good shape and backed up.

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Yes, definitely. In the case of Lightroom, it is preserving your original input photo along with a list of edits and workflows you've applied to it. It also manages a database of preview images, so browsing full resolution albums is fast

There are no destructive edits in Lightroom unless you really go out of your way to cause the destruction

It also has client-side face recognition / clustering which relies on a local database, indexing by geographic location for GPS-tagged images, etc.

Essentially nobody needs Lightroom until they try it, after which it easily becomes impossible to live without and there is no replacement

> Essentially nobody needs Lightroom until they try it, after which it easily becomes impossible to live without and there is no replacement

I’ve tried Dark Table, but I’m afraid you may be correct. Trying to switch after 7 yrs of LR feels really challenging.

I've used Capture One Pro for a similar amount of time and anything else (LR included) feels like a step down. Probably mostly inertia and familiarity by this point.

Yeah, my goal is to be able to run my next photo software natively on a linux box, and to my knowledge Capture One is only available on MacOS and Windows. It does look like great software, though.

Yeah, it and Affinity Photo are pretty much the only reason I keep a Windows partition now.

I think Darktable looks like a contender but I'd prefer to be able to make it just use Adwaita and look normal.

You don't need the Lightroom catalogue to do most of what it does, including caching previews. I strongly prefer to use Adobe Bridge and Adobe Camera Raw because I have access to nearly all the tools in Lightroom without its wonky and cumbersome catalogue management process.

I switched from only LR to only RawTherapee for all new shots going forward about a year ago. Never looked back. Might not be suitable for a professional expecting smooth conventional workflow, but excellent for an enthusiast who enjoys full control and nerding over raw data interpretation.

If you're in the Apple ecosystem with an iPhone, some iPads and a Macbook, you sort of roll into it. Is it worth it? Not sure, it's sure easy and just works. But you're on your own when you try to interface with your data in "non conventional" ways.

I myself use NextCloud for everything, I recently moved from Android to iOS and it's nice to see most things working... except that NextCloud has issues making previews from .heic pictures (or I should say heic picture containers containing heif images coded in hevc :s), and so the drama starts again. It's always plug and pray outside the Apple ecosystem, always ymmv.

I like your quotes around "non conventional", as everything about storing files in a directory is the traditional and conventional way to store files.

Haha, yes it felt wrong subconsciously to call it non-conventional. Now that you mention it, I totally agree that it is Apple who in the games of doing things the non-conventional way. The opposite of the Unix philosophy. "Take all things, throw them together and make sure they only work in one, blessed, linear way."

Every once in a while I'll make an external backup of my parents' photo collection. Every single time, it's a royal pain to figure out where Apple has decided to put the iPhoto directory. There's no UI that points to it, no settings to configure the save location. It's like you're supposed to forget that these are your pictures to access as you please, and instead treat them as iPhoto's pictures, only to be accessed in the blessed interface.

I love that I can quickly click on a person and then get all the photos with that person. The same for a location.

The "memories" slideshows that iPhone or gphoto generate are sometimes also very nice to see.

The search functionality also comes handy once in a while. So that I can search for pictures of certain things.

For sharing photos the shared albums are also very easy to work with. Both to create and the receiver to import any interesting photos to my/their library.

Giving up the file system is difficult but it’s a godsend. I hated losing the Events when moving from iPhoto to Photos, but in practice no one wants to organize photos and I certainly did not enjoy it, as anal I as I was.

Nowadays we don’t have events anymore, it’s just a continuous flow or random photos that may or may not belong to a specific event. The great part is that photos are always in chronological order and I never have to deal with “files” (copies, same names, etc).

The only exception are professionals and Photos.app definitely isn’t intended for them.

I too prefer chronological order instead of some "organized" collection of directories. My point is that this is something that a photo indexing app of some sort (Piwigo in my case) should do and leave the files be.

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