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Comment by acomjean | Hacker News Reader

I’ve switched to Linux, and one of the hardest things was to find photo organization software. Adobe Lightroom was good this. I’m still sorting it out on Linux.

I tried Darktable and found it really useful for editing raw files. Once you figure out the filters they’re powerful and professional.

Darktable really opionated about how it stores files/ libraries however. It really wants you to have one library for all your photos, where I used separate libraries for various events I’ve photographed. Also going through and ranking photos wasn’t as straight forward (is it applying the rank to the image on the strip on the bottom vs the image in the main window?)

So I’m sorting with digikam, though it’s editing features don’t seem as powerful. It’s a process.

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You may want to have a look to a software called tonphotos if you just want to sort and filter pictures. If I remember well it doesn't allow image edition though.

For the moment pay for lightroom just for my needs but the bills are starting to sting... To stay on windows, the best alternatives I found are zoner photo studio X and Mylio photo but the first one doesn't do face recognition and the second one doesn't handle a camera I used several years ago.

Digikam would be good I guess but I can't stand the UI.

Start the cancel plan wizard on Adobe's site. I have to go on there once a year or so and talk to an agent from the cancel page and they usually cut my rate in half for another year.

wow thanks for the info !

I'm using Collections in darktable to achieve this. Have you tried it? Although I don't distinguish on an event basis I sort everything into folders by month.

  -2024
   --jan
   --feb
   ...
   --nov
   --dec
  -2025
   --jan

I did.

Part of my mindset is when I’m done with an event I don’t want to have to deal with those folders, but know where to find them. I have a large set of “everything else” photos that works well with darktable.

It’s partially the burden of how I used to do it… maybe I’m being stubborn but it did work well for me.

I had the same problem. Lots of solutions out there I think PhotoPrism was the last one I tried but it involved docker. I really just want the Photos app from Mac on Linux. I was debating forking an existing project.

I am a happy user of PhotoPrism. I use it with Podman. I initially hated the fact that it requires containers but then I realized this makes it much easier to work with multiple libraries simultaneously which was mentioned by OP. The Photos app on the Mac does not allow using multiple libraries simultaneously; I believe it needs to be restarted to switch libraries.

If you really don't want to use containers, then it's possible (with sufficient OS knowledge) to install the software natively by looking at the Dockerfile and manually running the commands.

> I really just want the Photos app from Mac on Linux. I was debating forking an existing project.

If you want design help let me know.

Bu yes, this. There is no "in between" on linux. Photo apps either do everything confusingly, or it does nothing but show you the photo.

If Darktable had "simple" and "professional" settings it would be awesome. Sometimes you just want a quick edit and other times it needs to be more complex. But I have to wade through endless tiny crowded options in Darktable just to crop and change some basic levels.

Digikam gets a bit closer, but it still starts as complicated.

It would be great if the application gave you a simple interface at first, and then you can add on complexity if you need it. You want detailed curve manipulations? Great! Select "Add feature" and choose "Curves". This would help a lot with linux growth IMHO since it is the one thing I hear that frustrates just about everyone who does not want to use google photos.

The Photos App from Apple is only getting worse as well and Adobe is a horric mess of subscriptions and AI BS.

I think my issue is a lot of them slow down to a crawl and Digikam fell under this problem for me. Importing thousands of images and videos isnt easy. I did like that Photoprism had a WebUI made it easy to access the photos across my network.

Yep, the only photo library tool I’ve used that can handle 40K raws is Lightroom and Photomechanic. Everything else can’t handle ~2TB of photos.

I am genuinely curious of what a good solution would be to this problem, because I love Photos on Mac but its not perfect either, one key thing Photos does insanely well is face grouping.

I use Digikam on a 3 TiB collection and it works great.

What database are you using and did you slowly build it up or what?

The Digikam DB is SQLite on a fast NVMe drive. The photos are on a 4 TB SSD. I have been using Digikam for maybe a decads, so the collection has been growing with me, but no issues so far.

Photos also stuffs everything into a proprietary database... a blunder made by far too many photo applications.

What would be the alternative to easily search through meta data of thousands of photos? Is there a non-proprietary database (engine or schema?), or other format that is scalable enough? I doubt that storing everything as a sidecar would be fast enough.

Valid question. How fast does it need to be, though?

I see a lot of performance complains from people with 75k+ image libraries, so performance should be considered when storing image (meta)data.

Just for info, just did a quick test: the digikam 'proprietary' database is a normal sqlite database that you can easily open and query in standard tools like duckdb. So pretty accessible, much better than some proprietary binary file, or using exif tools on 1000s of photos.

Look at Immich

The problem is the seemingly endless parade of photo software that forces you to add everything to a "database," instead of simply a directory structure. It's tedious as hell, and must be manually kept up to date all the time instead of simply picking up any files added to the structure.

And then you open the app and it says I gotta delete the database cause it’s corrupted

I edit with Darktable, but organize with DigiKam. Not that Darktable is bad, but I prefer to organize my rendered JPEGs, not my RAWs.

Pretty much the same, here, with digikam used to aggregate collections of images taken and edited by other, specialized, software. I don't hate that set-up: IMO, the requirements for processing RAWs and managing a collection are different enough to warrant separate tools, and I find digikam really pleasant to work with. What would you like to see improved?

  What would you like to see improved?

Last time I tried digikam it crashed on startup (macos). This was back in September. I'm sure it's not a hugely popular opinion in open source circles, but IMO neither digikam nor darktable are good enough to warrant the hassle of dealing with separate applications.

Lightroom is a bit of jack of all trades, but it's good enough as a DAM that I'm not wanting for a separate app.

I don't have stability issues with digikam while using it on fedora. It's well maintained and sees frequent releases so if I were you and had some spare time, I wouldn't shy away from opening issues and reaching out to developers.

And yeah, sure, if the "do it all" approach works for you, and the tool you desire already exists, I'm not there to turn you away from it! Since digikam can open any lot of images in a side application for edition, I'm not sure what kind of improvements a "kitchen sink" application would do to my workflows and I was curious about that :-)

  I don't have stability issues with digikam while using it on fedora

Right, I'm not switching to Linux just for digikam.

  Since digikam can open any lot of images in a side application for edition

If I'm going to open a photo in Lightroom anyways, why not use it for asset management? I'm not wedded to an all-in-one solution, but neither digikam nor darktable/rawtherapee offer enough of an improvement over the respective modules within Lightroom to warrant usage.

I absolutely detest this whole "library" business. Why can't just I open a file? Or just browse a folder, click some files and edit them? WTF is a "library"? A "film roll"? Keep it real.

I also wish they had a better color calibration workflow. Everything looks like trash with the new color calibration and filmic RGB nonsense. Especially DJI-shot raw files. Lightroom opens them fine.

Same here. It all began with itunes and having duplicates of my mp3s. I always been more of a winamp user myself ! On my mac I use Photomator and appreciate how it allows me to browse my ssd and use my very own file tree

The main problem I see with "just files in folders" is thumbnails. You need some thumbnail cache, ideally pregenerated, for speedy browsing. And once you've got that, you've lost the simplicity of "just files" anyhow.

And you might not want them, but things like facial recognition, search by metadata, and object detection really only work with a central database/index of all the photos you have.

Just store the thumbnails in a cache or in a dotfile subdirectory. This can be transparent to the user. If the user is going linearly down or up the list you can also use a Kalman filter to predict what files and directories the user might browse next and preroad thumbnails for those directories in advance. Don't wait till the user actually scrolls to something to start working on thumbnail generation. UI Design 101.

Also, many consumer cameras embed thumbnails in metadata that can be extracted almost instantaneously. For those there is no image resizing work to do. But you can still load the thumbnails into memory in advance to make it even snappier.

Just don't make me add the folder to a "roll" or "library" just to browse it for 5 seconds.

You've more or less outlined what programs like Lightroom, DigiKam, and Darktable do. The integration with e.g. LR or DT gets you thumbnails rendered with whatever processing needs to be applied.

As I'm typically using whatever to copy images off of a phone or an external memory dongle I don't mind adding things to a catalog. The import process copies the files memory dongle and into folders organized by capture date. Certainly (for me) it's easier to hit a couple buttons in LR than it is to copy everything over manually. You can also set LR to automatically import pictures.

If you really are just allergic to importing photos, in the proprietary world Adobe Bridge can be used to go through your photos in a manner you've described. You can also quite a bit of management from the import screen in LR without having to actually import photos into a collection.

FastRawViewer (only Win/Mac, paid software) shows true RAW decoding (not embedded JPEG previews!) faster than 90% of other software shows cached previews.

Also, Adobe Bridge works with folders without any formal "collection" or "import" concepts. It cache meta and previews in user's home directory, but it is transparent to the user.

You might be happy organizing your own folders but 99.9% of people are happier to dump their photos into a software and have the software manage the files and folders behind a database and make cloud sync and sharing go brr.

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