5 ms·

IMHO it's the best FOSS photo application out there. It's cross platform, fast, stable and manages the whole photo workflow (RAW developing, photo management, n

IMHO it's the best FOSS photo application out there. It's cross platform, fast, stable and manages the whole photo workflow (RAW developing, photo management, non destructive editing). Thanks darktable folks!

JorgeGT 10y ago
> It's cross platform Are there Windows builds? There was a guy that did but he stopped at 2.0.
- geppetto 10y ago
  Oops! You're right there's no official Windows port. I've run it on Mac and Linux only.
  - JorgeGT 10y ago
    I've been able to run it on the Linux Subsystem for Windows with an X server, but there was still a few quirks I believe.
- wtallis 10y ago
  There's been renewed work on a clean Windows port in recent months: https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/pull/1327 https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/pull/1327
  - JorgeGT 10y ago
    Interesting! They almost lynched the guy at the beginning but seems that there's progress.
    - exception_e 10y ago
      It is very interesting. I don't want to intrude on their thread, but if others here vouch for this technique I'll politely ask them to look into the following: - https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/docker-containers-on-the-desktop/ https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/docker-containers-on-the-desk... - http://boot2docker.io/ http://boot2docker.io/ ...has anyone here ever used this approach with nix apps that need to run on Windows "natively"? Writing a powershell script to silently install boot2docker with this special docker image wouldn't be too difficult. The DarkTable folks don't seem interesting in maintaining Win builds so this may be the perfect workaround. NOTE: I realize that `File > Open Image` may be non-trivial, but surely there's a way to mount a host<->guest folder (e.g.: When using the application, the workspace is located in `C:\Users\$whoami\Documents\DarkTable\.jpg`)
      - sz4kerto 10y ago
        Boot2Docker is not for this purpose. Silently installing a VM on a Windows PC is a very bad idea. If the user is not proficient enough to know about and configure the VM, then what happens if - B2D installs a Virtualbox instance, but Hyper-V is on. VBox can't run besides Hyper-V. - How do you configure the resource usage for the VM?Something like Darktable requires a lot of resources - How do you manage shared folders? VBox shared folder performance is really bad compared to native - Do you install an X server as well? Anyway -- it's just a bad idea.
      - exception_e 10y ago
        Thanks sz4kerto. I'm glad I got some thoughts here before posting that in their PR (I obviously won't post it now because of the points you brought up). I guess a user that would be comfortable with b2d or vbox would just have those running anyways! Note: for you question about X, please check out https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/docker-containers-on-the-desktop/ https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/docker-containers-on-the-desk...
    - vvanders 10y ago
      Wow you weren't kidding. > It may be better to go help out some other free software project that already had the misfortune of working on that platform... I understand their points about maintenance, but telling someone to go work on something else rather than keeping an experimental branch around, sheesh. As someone who appreciates open source and works primarily on Windows I really wish they had a better attitude. Take a look at Rust or Elixir, fantastic communities and the software is better for it. I'm sure that Darktable has some interesting things but based on what I saw in that thread I think I'll be sticking to Lightroom.
      - digler999 10y ago
        I've only read that quote, but to me that doesn't seem like a rude thing to say. I interpret it as "This windows branch is awful, it might be better for you to abandon that effort and work on something with more potential". I hear it as criticizing the code, not the person. Edit: I read a little more, looks like the devs were upset because windows isn't a free platform, and they didn't want darktable's reputation marred by a buggy port. > This will be very bad for darktable reputation
        vvanders 10y ago
        It was in the context of building trust, basically "go away and work on another project so we know who you are before you can touch our holy code". That guy came in with a great attitude and approach, he pretty much got told to pack it.
        digler999 10y ago
        I dont believe in being rude to people, but sometimes you have to make things clear. In their comment chain they asked the dev to rename the application so it didn't give the reputation a bad name. I can understand that, especially since Darktable apparently is a really good app. Open source means you can take the code and build/modify/play with it, it doesn't mean you can take the name and reputation of a product and apply it in a new direction (using the same name).
- snarfy 10y ago
  It works in Windows 10 using the Linux for Windows feature, and then using a suitable windows X server. http://i.imgur.com/MxadCpg.png http://i.imgur.com/MxadCpg.png
cs702 10y ago
Agree. I would add three more qualities to your list: * Fully programmable, via a nicely document Lua interface: http://www.darktable.org/lua-api/index.html.php http://www.darktable.org/lua-api/index.html.php -- you can automate all kinds of workflows. * Truly innovative, with clever new features unavailable in other applications, including Lightroom. For example, five years ago they added a powerful new "equalizer" module: http://www.darktable.org/2011/11/darktable-and-research/ http://www.darktable.org/2011/11/darktable-and-research/ (google "darktable equazlier" for usage examples). * Always improving: I've been using it for years and the developers keep finding ways to make it better all the time. Congratulations on another great release!
uniclaude 10y ago
Definitely agree! I make a substantial part of my income (just enough to pay rent) selling photography, and I recently dropped ps and lightroom in favor of Darktable. The change didn't happen in a day, but Darktable is so good I don't think I'll ever need to come back to Adobe. Notable plus, I can now spend most of my time on Linux, no more need to use my Macbook for photo work. The interface is not really good for smaller displays and resolutions (adobe stuff was better on my 11 inch mba), but on anything with more than 1280 x 960 px, it's great. Congratulations to the Darktable team for this 2.2 release!
- pkaye 10y ago
  Any experience using RawTherapee also? Just an hobbyist myself and moving away from the Mac platform so figuring out the best alternatives.
  - uniclaude 10y ago
    Never tried RawTherapee, won't be able to help here sorry!
  - stevekemp 10y ago
    I don't make a living via photography, but I do receive income from taking pictures of escorts, and pets. (Strange how you find your niche!) I've been using RawTherapee, on Linux, for the past few years. For my needs of marking images, doing post-processing, and mass-operations, it works perfectly. I'm always reluctant to allow a tool to manage the layout/tagging of my images. So for that I have a strictly sorted hierarchy: ~/Images/ ~/Images/2016 ~/Images/2016/12/04-Hannah ~/Images/2016/12/12-Tiffany Inside each "event"-folder I store: RAW/ JPG/ JPG/thumbs/ Teasers/ Teasers/thumbs/ Then I write out a meta-data file, ".meta", with detail such as: Location=Studio|MyPlace|Their Hotel|Whatever Contact-Details=+44... Tags=lingerie,nude,shillouette,monochrome .. It works well, and allows me to find files years later via a simple `grep`.
  - brudgers 10y ago
    I am also a hobbyist and I use Darktable. I've experimented with RawTherapee. I like RawTherapee's editing controls and love that its sidecar files are somewhat human readable (Darktable's are not). What Rawtherapee lacks is the 'light table' feature for handling bulk photographs. I'll often shoot several hundred images in a day (even a blind squirrel finds a nut sometimes). Darktable lets me triage those photos and filter them for processing without managing a file system... well now that my workflow uses RapidPhotoDownloader on the front end. It reads off the memory card and renames files and directories to a standard format. A few months ago, I brought many years worth of sorted directories of images into Darktable and went to bed and when I woke up it had added everything to the database and I could sort by name and remove duplicates and look at thumbnails and remove junk that had been saved alongside stuff I wanted during bulk operations. Anyway, since Darktable runs on Mac, there's not a drop dead reason not to give it a spin alongside whatever you're currently using.
cookiecaper 10y ago
I regret that I haven't really had the opportunity to explore Darktable very thoroughly. Every time I would try to point it at my library folder it would choke to death. Perhaps I should re-organize around Darktable, but right now I have other components of my workflow that are hard to imagine replacing, primarily DxO -- this was the main driver that got me to switch to a Windows host running a Linux VM and doing all my real work over SSH to the local VM, after years of struggling through painfully slow editing in a Windows VM on a Linux host. I resent that Windows's bad, less flexible behavior has forced me to make it my host OS. :'( At the moment I don't have a good library app, I just browse the directory structure. I've tried Lightroom but it too struggles with my library folder, although unlike Darktable, it is marginally usable. I've tried Digikam, and while it's the only one that seems to handle the library in a semi-respectable fashion (with the experimental, now-deprecated MySQL backend enabled, which iirc took some manual massaging to even make compile anymore), it's hard to get the components I really wanted to work reliably (it's very important the my camera's GPS tags can be mapped and sorted; this is my main interest in a library manager and as of now, all such programs are too overloaded to do this competently or half-broken like Digikam's integration, and when I need GPS-based information I guess I will have to try to write a script that reads the coords out manually with exiftool instead of trying out Yet Another Library Manager). Adobe is absolutely that 1k lb gorilla in the room that everyone is afraid to compete with. Add to that that photography programs are very difficult and complex work and it makes the field, particularly the field of volunteer developers who make contributions to a FOSS project, pretty limited. For the record, the current size of my library: [me@my_host photos]$ find . -name .snapshots -prune -o -iname "*.CR2" -print | wc -l | xargs printf "%'d\n" 97,596 [me@my_host photos]$ find . -name .snapshots -prune -o -iname "*.JPG" -print | wc -l | xargs printf "%'d\n" 177,785 [me@my_host photos]$ du -sh --exclude=./.snapshots 2.8T . .snapshots being the btrfs snapshot tree, which makes these numbers about 16x higher, but is a relatively recent addition (around the time I moved to a Windows host) so isn't the reason everything has choked historically. Hopefully stuff like Lightroom isn't trying to parse these directories as well. I guess I could blacklist them from sharing in Samba to try to get around it. Open to any tips others may have.
- fbleagh 10y ago
  http://www.fastrawviewer.com/ http://www.fastrawviewer.com/ or On1 Browse are good fast raw viewers on windows. I use them to 'manage' my library as I use a mix of raw processors and don't want to be tied to them for my workflow.

JorgeGT 10y ago

> It's cross platform Are there Windows builds? There was a guy that did but he stopped at 2.0.

geppetto 10y ago
Oops! You're right there's no official Windows port. I've run it on Mac and Linux only.
- JorgeGT 10y ago
  I've been able to run it on the Linux Subsystem for Windows with an X server, but there was still a few quirks I believe.
wtallis 10y ago
There's been renewed work on a clean Windows port in recent months: https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/pull/1327 https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/pull/1327
- JorgeGT 10y ago
  Interesting! They almost lynched the guy at the beginning but seems that there's progress.
  - exception_e 10y ago
    It is very interesting. I don't want to intrude on their thread, but if others here vouch for this technique I'll politely ask them to look into the following: - https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/docker-containers-on-the-desktop/ https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/docker-containers-on-the-desk... - http://boot2docker.io/ http://boot2docker.io/ ...has anyone here ever used this approach with nix apps that need to run on Windows "natively"? Writing a powershell script to silently install boot2docker with this special docker image wouldn't be too difficult. The DarkTable folks don't seem interesting in maintaining Win builds so this may be the perfect workaround. NOTE: I realize that `File > Open Image` may be non-trivial, but surely there's a way to mount a host<->guest folder (e.g.: When using the application, the workspace is located in `C:\Users\$whoami\Documents\DarkTable\.jpg`)
    - sz4kerto 10y ago
      Boot2Docker is not for this purpose. Silently installing a VM on a Windows PC is a very bad idea. If the user is not proficient enough to know about and configure the VM, then what happens if - B2D installs a Virtualbox instance, but Hyper-V is on. VBox can't run besides Hyper-V. - How do you configure the resource usage for the VM?Something like Darktable requires a lot of resources - How do you manage shared folders? VBox shared folder performance is really bad compared to native - Do you install an X server as well? Anyway -- it's just a bad idea.
    - exception_e 10y ago
      Thanks sz4kerto. I'm glad I got some thoughts here before posting that in their PR (I obviously won't post it now because of the points you brought up). I guess a user that would be comfortable with b2d or vbox would just have those running anyways! Note: for you question about X, please check out https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/docker-containers-on-the-desktop/ https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/docker-containers-on-the-desk...
  - vvanders 10y ago
    Wow you weren't kidding. > It may be better to go help out some other free software project that already had the misfortune of working on that platform... I understand their points about maintenance, but telling someone to go work on something else rather than keeping an experimental branch around, sheesh. As someone who appreciates open source and works primarily on Windows I really wish they had a better attitude. Take a look at Rust or Elixir, fantastic communities and the software is better for it. I'm sure that Darktable has some interesting things but based on what I saw in that thread I think I'll be sticking to Lightroom.
    - digler999 10y ago
      I've only read that quote, but to me that doesn't seem like a rude thing to say. I interpret it as "This windows branch is awful, it might be better for you to abandon that effort and work on something with more potential". I hear it as criticizing the code, not the person. Edit: I read a little more, looks like the devs were upset because windows isn't a free platform, and they didn't want darktable's reputation marred by a buggy port. > This will be very bad for darktable reputation
      - vvanders 10y ago
        It was in the context of building trust, basically "go away and work on another project so we know who you are before you can touch our holy code". That guy came in with a great attitude and approach, he pretty much got told to pack it.
        digler999 10y ago
        I dont believe in being rude to people, but sometimes you have to make things clear. In their comment chain they asked the dev to rename the application so it didn't give the reputation a bad name. I can understand that, especially since Darktable apparently is a really good app. Open source means you can take the code and build/modify/play with it, it doesn't mean you can take the name and reputation of a product and apply it in a new direction (using the same name).
snarfy 10y ago
It works in Windows 10 using the Linux for Windows feature, and then using a suitable windows X server. http://i.imgur.com/MxadCpg.png http://i.imgur.com/MxadCpg.png

cs702 10y ago

Agree. I would add three more qualities to your list: * Fully programmable, via a nicely document Lua interface: http://www.darktable.org/lua-api/index.html.php http://www.darktable.org/lua-api/index.html.php -- you can automate all kinds of workflows. * Truly innovative, with clever new features unavailable in other applications, including Lightroom. For example, five years ago they added a powerful new "equalizer" module: http://www.darktable.org/2011/11/darktable-and-research/ http://www.darktable.org/2011/11/darktable-and-research/ (google "darktable equazlier" for usage examples). * Always improving: I've been using it for years and the developers keep finding ways to make it better all the time. Congratulations on another great release!

uniclaude 10y ago

Definitely agree! I make a substantial part of my income (just enough to pay rent) selling photography, and I recently dropped ps and lightroom in favor of Darktable. The change didn't happen in a day, but Darktable is so good I don't think I'll ever need to come back to Adobe. Notable plus, I can now spend most of my time on Linux, no more need to use my Macbook for photo work. The interface is not really good for smaller displays and resolutions (adobe stuff was better on my 11 inch mba), but on anything with more than 1280 x 960 px, it's great. Congratulations to the Darktable team for this 2.2 release!

pkaye 10y ago
Any experience using RawTherapee also? Just an hobbyist myself and moving away from the Mac platform so figuring out the best alternatives.
- uniclaude 10y ago
  Never tried RawTherapee, won't be able to help here sorry!
- stevekemp 10y ago
  I don't make a living via photography, but I do receive income from taking pictures of escorts, and pets. (Strange how you find your niche!) I've been using RawTherapee, on Linux, for the past few years. For my needs of marking images, doing post-processing, and mass-operations, it works perfectly. I'm always reluctant to allow a tool to manage the layout/tagging of my images. So for that I have a strictly sorted hierarchy: ~/Images/ ~/Images/2016 ~/Images/2016/12/04-Hannah ~/Images/2016/12/12-Tiffany Inside each "event"-folder I store: RAW/ JPG/ JPG/thumbs/ Teasers/ Teasers/thumbs/ Then I write out a meta-data file, ".meta", with detail such as: Location=Studio|MyPlace|Their Hotel|Whatever Contact-Details=+44... Tags=lingerie,nude,shillouette,monochrome .. It works well, and allows me to find files years later via a simple `grep`.
- brudgers 10y ago
  I am also a hobbyist and I use Darktable. I've experimented with RawTherapee. I like RawTherapee's editing controls and love that its sidecar files are somewhat human readable (Darktable's are not). What Rawtherapee lacks is the 'light table' feature for handling bulk photographs. I'll often shoot several hundred images in a day (even a blind squirrel finds a nut sometimes). Darktable lets me triage those photos and filter them for processing without managing a file system... well now that my workflow uses RapidPhotoDownloader on the front end. It reads off the memory card and renames files and directories to a standard format. A few months ago, I brought many years worth of sorted directories of images into Darktable and went to bed and when I woke up it had added everything to the database and I could sort by name and remove duplicates and look at thumbnails and remove junk that had been saved alongside stuff I wanted during bulk operations. Anyway, since Darktable runs on Mac, there's not a drop dead reason not to give it a spin alongside whatever you're currently using.

cookiecaper 10y ago

I regret that I haven't really had the opportunity to explore Darktable very thoroughly. Every time I would try to point it at my library folder it would choke to death. Perhaps I should re-organize around Darktable, but right now I have other components of my workflow that are hard to imagine replacing, primarily DxO -- this was the main driver that got me to switch to a Windows host running a Linux VM and doing all my real work over SSH to the local VM, after years of struggling through painfully slow editing in a Windows VM on a Linux host. I resent that Windows's bad, less flexible behavior has forced me to make it my host OS. :'( At the moment I don't have a good library app, I just browse the directory structure. I've tried Lightroom but it too struggles with my library folder, although unlike Darktable, it is marginally usable. I've tried Digikam, and while it's the only one that seems to handle the library in a semi-respectable fashion (with the experimental, now-deprecated MySQL backend enabled, which iirc took some manual massaging to even make compile anymore), it's hard to get the components I really wanted to work reliably (it's very important the my camera's GPS tags can be mapped and sorted; this is my main interest in a library manager and as of now, all such programs are too overloaded to do this competently or half-broken like Digikam's integration, and when I need GPS-based information I guess I will have to try to write a script that reads the coords out manually with exiftool instead of trying out Yet Another Library Manager). Adobe is absolutely that 1k lb gorilla in the room that everyone is afraid to compete with. Add to that that photography programs are very difficult and complex work and it makes the field, particularly the field of volunteer developers who make contributions to a FOSS project, pretty limited. For the record, the current size of my library: [me@my_host photos]$ find . -name .snapshots -prune -o -iname "*.CR2" -print | wc -l | xargs printf "%'d\n" 97,596 [me@my_host photos]$ find . -name .snapshots -prune -o -iname "*.JPG" -print | wc -l | xargs printf "%'d\n" 177,785 [me@my_host photos]$ du -sh --exclude=./.snapshots 2.8T . .snapshots being the btrfs snapshot tree, which makes these numbers about 16x higher, but is a relatively recent addition (around the time I moved to a Windows host) so isn't the reason everything has choked historically. Hopefully stuff like Lightroom isn't trying to parse these directories as well. I guess I could blacklist them from sharing in Samba to try to get around it. Open to any tips others may have.

fbleagh 10y ago
http://www.fastrawviewer.com/ http://www.fastrawviewer.com/ or On1 Browse are good fast raw viewers on windows. I use them to 'manage' my library as I use a mix of raw processors and don't want to be tied to them for my workflow.