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Comment by Nergg | Hacker News Reader

I try to daily drive Linux but can't find a simple / nice to use RAW editor. I had high hopes for Darktable but I was astonished how bad the GUI is. When trying to delete photo, it deletes the photo under the pointer, not the photo I selected... WTF ?!? And the whole app feels so complicated... Then there's forks emerging and the dev forces are diluted in multiples applications and Adobe continues to milk its users because Open Source dev can't work together. Between Shotwell, Gthumb, Loupe, RT, DigiKam, and more... Imagine if all this efforts was done in one cohesive app ? Ok I stop dreaming.

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If you seek a GUI for managing/cataloguing photos, my advice would be to look for that and not a raw image processing tool that incidentally happens to also handle cataloguing (inevitably in a half-baked way).

I have never seen Lightroom (or C1, for that matter) as compelling at all ever since I started using RawTherapee. Unlike, say, InDesign, which is legitimately a difficult to replace professional tool with incredible capabilities, Adobe’s raw image processing offering looks incredibly dumbed down.

Yes good point. But my needs are very limited. On macOS I use the Photo app to cull, make small adjustments, and crop. On Windows there is also a Photo app that allows such basic features. They both works with RAW and works fine with my NAS mount in smb to cull directly the files (though macOS is a pain for that, doesn't play well with files, need to import in lib).

On linux, the default Gnome image viewer is nice but you can't make adjustement and when deleting a file, the file is not remove from the NAS directory (need a manual refresh). With Gthumb it works for deleting files but the crop tool and the overall app is not as nice. Anyway I'll continue to look for my perfect app or for the default Gnome viewer to update its features (I think it is in active development)

I windows I highly recommend IrfanView just for basic photo viewing (odd name). It's extremely fast.

Yes I've used it and it's very good. Too bad it's not on Linux and macOS.

Maybe take a look at GraphicConverter for the Mac. While it isn't a file Management tool, it's really useful for tweaking various details.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GraphicConverter

It sounds like you would really like DigiKam! Great library management, and solid basic editing functionality. Optional face detection as well.

  my advice would be to look for that and not a raw image processing tool
  that incidentally happens to also handle cataloguing (inevitably in a
  half-baked way).

Eh. No? Lightroom is a pretty darn good DAM. Maybe digiKam is at least as good, but I wouldn't know as it crashed the first time I launched it. I want to use my tools, not debug them. DT's asset management is, to put it charitably, an after thought.

About the worst thing I can say about Lightroom is that it didn't reliably work with my iPhone. Otherwise it did everything I needed in terms of tagging, presets, and organizing the pictures on the file system.

Meanwhile darktable creates freaking sidecars for every picture while it relies on an SQLite database for tracking history just like Lightroom does.

  I have never seen Lightroom (or C1, for that matter) as compelling at all ever since
  I started using RawTherapee.

Conversely Darktable is the best advert I've seen for Lighgtroom.

Maybe Lightroom is okay for cataloguing, I cannot say because I have not used it this way extensively, but it is not up to par in terms of raw processing control in my view.

That insane behavior around acting on the highlighted image instead of the selected image has finally been fixed: https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/issues/16850#issu...

Filmulator (I really need to fix the CI...)

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