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Comment by 2bitencryption | Hacker News Reader

Really glad there's advanced open-source tools like darktable and RawTherapee.

I've switched back and forth between RawTherapee and darktable for a few years now.

I prefer the UI and workflow or RT, but dt has better performance on my machine. And RT has this strange longstanding bug where the image is extremely blurry during editing, and only becomes clear after exporting. According to a github issue, a workaround is to disable lens correction (and anything else in the "transform" tab) but this didn't work for me, prompting my most recent switch to dt.

current biggest grip with dt... why are those damn arrows at the edges of the screen so tiny??? Expanding and retracting the side panels requires pixel-perfect accuracy on a ~20px target. I know I could use keyboard shortcuts, but my brain isn't wired for them yet.

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> current biggest grip with dt... why are those damn arrows at the edges of the screen so tiny??? Expanding and retracting the side panels requires pixel-perfect accuracy on a ~20px target. I know I could use keyboard shortcuts, but my brain isn't wired for them yet.

You can make them bigger through some CSS tweaks: https://docs.darktable.org/usermanual/development/en/prefere...

It's open source, you can change anything. The UI shouldn't be so annoying and hostile out of the box regardless.

I reported this issue on irc years ago and the dev response was so hostile I abandoned trying to use it and never looked back. I pay Adobe $500/year for software that had been tested by users with developers silently watching.

Most projects have an issue tracker where one proposes changes or reports bugs. The IRC channel is labeled "Support channel for darktable" rather than "Tell the developer how they ought to better serve me for free"

People have a finite slice of their life to give you for nothing. Putting specific suggestions on the issue tracker seems more respectful of their time.

I raised a ticket on an open source project about a defect. It was open for 6 months with no comment. So I fixed it and did a PR. The PR was still sitting there open after 6 months. More interesting PRs to the developers have been merged.

Attention and stewardship are not universal.

What I usually do when I see promising projects and slow devs.

1. "This one issue is what is stopping me from using this product. Is this current method preferred by your users or do you have any other reason to not want to change?"

2. "The proprietary solution costs $X per month. Is there any way to sponsor development? I am willing to give $X/n (where n is whatever number you are comfortable with) per month to get this issue merged and to have some sort of prioritization when triaging issues.

3. Failing those: write a blog post and propose a fork. This is usually the quickest way to get a reaction from narcissistic developers.

Maybe some of these developers are just, you know… busy.

It's the busiest developers who would be interested in receiving PRs. If they go unanswered for six months, it is a clear signal that there is something stopping else them from action.

Do you think busy devs who also run open source projects tend to have plenty of time to set a high priority on FOSS?

Is Dark Table just a side-project from one busy developer?

> It's the busiest developers who would be interested in receiving PRs.

Depends on the PR. Bugfixes sure, but new features mean more work for the maintianer in the future.

It is also an opportunity for someone to feel involved and eventually join the group, perhaps even become a maintainer.

Speaking as a project maintainer that is starting to see some traction: I'd love to see people coming with PRs for features. It would mean a big amount of validation.

Having tried to improve things on multiple projects and being ignored or got hostile responses I gave up on open source contribution.

I bought a Mac and use Lightroom and I’m happy to give them both my money.

There are loads of friendly and welcoming OpenSource communities.

I'm sorry you did not stumble into them, but instead in the few hostile ones. It's a pity that made you give up.

A general tip, I give to people wishing to contribute to OSS is to first watch from the sideline. Read issues, threads, subscribe to an ML etc. Then to ask. Don't just throw in PR or feature request, but ask: is this welcome? How do you work? Any particular details that you wish me to pay extra attention to (tabs, spaces, tests, documentation, design).

As a FLOSS maintainer myself, it can be very intimidating to have someone throw a PR at you that rewrites everything (it comes across as: you suck, your software sucks, but watch me fix all that), or that disregards things that I deem critical (tests, architecture) It is really hard to review it, without coming across as an arrogant bastard. And often software that I put on a back burner will require me significant effort to get back into. So merging a simple typo fix or dependency update might cost half a day, just to get the dev env back up.

I certainly wasn't arrogant with the last one.

Hey dudes, there's a pointer dereferencing crash here which occurs when I do X, Y then Z. Added one line change to fix it. SILENCE.

There are no test cases for most projects either.

Darktable is great! This year I restarted photography, ina serious manner, after quite some time. Serious as in I try to get beautiful pictures I could hang on a wall. I also started to do proper post processing, and darktable is quite handy.

My dad used to be a pro photographer, now retired, and gave me crash course in RAW processing. Besides some handling differences between lightroom and photoshop he nothing negative to say about darktable. And neither do I, it's not darktables fault that my photo library is a mess.

Does your dad have any suggestion on resources/books that others can use to learn the same crash course he gave you? :)

Hevcertainly does, in fact besides years of experience he has quite a number of books at home. All in German so... If that's ok I can ask!

Thank you for the offer! Unfortunately I don't know German, so don't want to trouble you.

Ah, a pity... If you don't know yet, photography life . com has some good resources to get started!

I wish the effort is united between dt and rt (and maybe digiKam for management), then we'd have a Blender-level competitor against LightRoom maybe

This reminds me, I upgraded to the latest Ubuntu LTS and now digikam won’t open! This is with the latest app image, and there is some system library version mismatch. I looked up a bug report for the same error message that came up on a different program, and it seems app image isn’t as self contained as I thought! I recently bought a used Canon Pro 100 printer and was having fun printing my photos until this bug preventing me from opening digiKam!

AppImages are only as self-contained as the author put effort into making them self-contained. There's also upper limits to how self-contained they are. While some terminal and bitmap only X11 app can be compiled as static binaries, anything that depends on system libraries needs to be compiled with an older version of glibc. The best example is libGl (GLX or EGL) for hardware 3D acceleration or libvdpau for hardware media decoding. You can't just bundle those, you have to use the system ones. Using any system library forces you to use glibc (AppImage don't work on Alpine). OpenSSL and a few other a libs you usually want to use the system one and have a built-in fallback because of security concerns.

Making perfect AppImages is often possible, but the automated tooling isn't smart enough. A proper AppImage (this one is by me) look like this: https://github.com/Elv13/reclaimail/blob/master/docker-edito... . Obviously this doesn't scale very well to projects with 300 dependencies like Digikam. My NeoVIM appimage linked above "really, really" bundles all dependency and compile your NeoVIM config to luajit bytecode. It's 3.9mb compared to the upstream one which is 15mb without any config. Note than 0.7mb of that 3.9 is the spellcheck dictionary, 0.4 my enormous config, 0.5 the AppImage overhead and 0.7 all the legacy plugins still written in vimscript.

Interesting. Yeah it seems like the solution for digikam on my solution was something like unpack the app image and recompile something and I’ve not had the time to mess with it. I hope the maintainer can release a fixed image at some point. I really like that app!

Wouldn't another option be to use the system package [0] or is the version too old? Or use the Flatpak [1] (or NIH-flatpak [2]), which is probably a better fit than AppImage for GUI programs that sit on top of a heavy toolkit.

[0] https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=digikam

[1] https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.kde.digikam

[2] https://snapcraft.io/digikam

A merger between digiKam and darktable would be my dream.

They collaborate a lot, actually. Many algorithms are ported from one to the other, if they work well and fit.

I'm also glad it exists but have never figured out how to use it on MacOS. I believe I somehow imported my entire /pictures folder at some point, producing many thousands of images in a film roll; I just downloaded 4.0.0 and have spent some time trying to figure out how to reset the film roll, or darktable altogether. Or how to create a new library. There's no typical top toolbar on MacOS.

In clicking around, I've selected "add to library," and darktable is now beachballed. CaptureOne will continue to be my default.

(Before someone points this out, let me acknowledge that the apparent problems with darktable are undoubtedly my fault in some capacity and that I'm Using It Wrong, or that I can't properly read the manual, or that I should watch more videos on how to use darktable.)

To reset Darktable’s databases, delete the two databases (files ending in “.db”) in the equivalent to ~/.config/darktable on your Mac.

One contains your custom configurations like presets, the other contains info about file locations, ratings, film rolls, etc.

Deleting and reimport takes time when a lot of files are involved, but is my preferred way of handling the changes of large scale file operations.

But film rolls might not be the best way to manage files.

After six years, I found searching the database using tags and Exif data such as camera and date ranges with the collection tool works better for me.

What also helps me is never deleting or moving an image file.

That way the database stays current and I avoid the busy work of file and folder manager.

To put it another way, for me flat search is better than hierarchy navigation.

  >I'm also glad it exists but have never figured out how to use it on MacOS

Same here. I just downloaded V4 to see if there was any improvement from last time I tried to use it

* Open app, Select 'Add to Library' --> spinning beachball of doom

delete the ~/.config/darktable directory, to give me a clean start...

* Open app. App opens in a weird window the full width of my screen but only half the depth. I try to resize the window. It won't rezise, even though I get resize arrows when hovering over the corner. Finally manage to make it usable by hitting the fullscreen widget.

* Try 'Add to Library' again. This time it allows me to select my photos archive folder. I see there's a tickbox marked 'Recursive' so I click on that as I have subfolders in my photos archive. I can't select the box. Then the spinning beachball of doom starts again...

* Force quit

* Delete app.

Life's just too short to mess about with an app that hangs twice, requiring a force quit, before I've even managed to do a single thing with it.

It's Linux software. Support for other operating systems is an afterthought. You guys have to deal with Adobe, or use a less advanced alternative.

For RAW editing DXO is great and runs native on Apple silicon. Recently bought ON1 and Affinity photos as well so there are other alternatives to Adobe, at least in the processing stage of RAW development.

MacOS supports RAW images as well. I’m wondering if DarkTable could/should leverage it.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212821

Yep. I use the spacebar a lot for that ; )

Does DXO still bundle rootkits (PACE) with their software?

I’m sorry don’t even know what the question means in this context or what pace is.

Google suggests https://paceap.com/ i.e. DRM.

Pace Interlock is the virulent DRM that DxO chose to bundle with all their software – even the trial versions. It's been so long I don't remember the details, but it's far more intrusive than Adobe's license management stuff. Especially in the context of open source software suggesting DxO anything is in poor taste unless they've ditched Pace.

Here's a little list of the problems Pace can cause:

http://web.archive.org/web/20071009193327/http://www.paceap....

> It's Linux software. Support for other operating systems is an afterthought.

This is the correct answer. I actually switched to Linux from macOS partly to be able to run darktable in a more native setting.

> It's Linux software. Support for other operating systems is an afterthought. >>This is the correct answer...

We're not talking non-MacOS [or non-Windows?] -like behaviour here. But the app not actually functioning. So why offer versions for other OSes, if it's Linux only software?

fwiw - darktable 3.8.1 runs for me on macos 10.13.6 (2011 17" mbp) and macos 10.15.7 (2013 27" iMac). App launch takes some moments on both, but responsiveness and performance is fine+ once running. Imports (without copy) works well enough for me. The *collections* and *film rolls* I've imported from non-local sources (NFS, SMB, ssh/sftp) 'complain' with a strikethrough on re-launch, but the thumbnails and metadata remain present locally even when disconnected.

There are also shortcuts for the arrow panels. Ctrl-Shift-{T,B,L,R}, IIRC (top, bottom, left, right).

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