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Serious question: Is there any good photo management software? I’m not even a hobbiest photographer but I’ve got 300GB of photos over 15 years, and it’s a pain

Serious question: Is there any good photo management software? I’m not even a hobbiest photographer but I’ve got 300GB of photos over 15 years, and it’s a pain in the ass to manage these. I tried Lightroom, but that was excruciatingly slow to import the photos, and on top of that it had very counter intuitive controls. It was also not cheap at all, and subscription based. I tried Google Photos (my current setup), but while cloud storage is nice, it’s UI sucks (it is Google after all), but most annoyingly you can’t actually name people in photos. Instead you have to wait for the face to get processed, then peruse 1000 faces of strangers just to find the face (hopefully) and then assign a name for it. Seriously, I can’t name my daughter in any picture taken in the last 2 years because of this. Apple Photos seems like the product I most want, but it insists that all the photos get stored locally, which is a nonstarter. Its cloud storage doesn’t make any sense because it seems like sync, which never what I want. Finally, it barfs if you try to import too many pictures at once. I’ve been using python scripts to manages my photos, but I’d really like good graphical manager that supports geo and face tagging, maybe some of the event stuff like Google Photos. Does anyone else have this problem? I can’t believe I’m the only one with these problems, but at the same time it’s hard for me to see a niche market for this. Any thought?

melicerte 9y ago
I'm using a mix DT and Flickr for photo management. The import feature of DT is pretty decent and you can choose the folders structure you want. Once imported, I'm using tags extensively to categorize my photos. You can even automatically apply tags to imported photos. Later, I export all my processed photos to Flickr[1] (1TB of space for free) and use their albums, tags, geolocation features to categorize them further. By processed photos, I mean photo I have reworked with DT (so not all my pictures, but the ones that really matter). [1] https://www.flickr.com https://www.flickr.com
melicerte 9y ago
I forgot to mention that DT support lua scripting[1] which might help you to further automate some steps of your photo management process.The Lua API is fairly complete. You can also grap some existing lua plugin like the one who can export/import to GIMP. [1] https://www.darktable.org/lua-api/ https://www.darktable.org/lua-api/ and https://github.com/darktable-org/lua-scripts https://github.com/darktable-org/lua-scripts
PuffinBlue 9y ago
No. They're all poor in some way. Lightroom is closest, especially with the latest uodate to improve speed in the Classic CC version. Other than that there are exceptional importers like Photomechnic ($$$) or Rapid Photo Downloader (free) but photo managers are all poor. Its unbelievable too. All it needs is a free version of lightrooms librart module that works on the embedded raw jpegs (like Photomechnic and Rapid Photo Downloader) and it would win photo management. Im learning to code with part of the motivation being I'm going to make my own that actually works because its so easy to see whats needed. By next christmas i hooe to have a rough first working attempt.

melicerte 9y ago

I'm using a mix DT and Flickr for photo management. The import feature of DT is pretty decent and you can choose the folders structure you want. Once imported, I'm using tags extensively to categorize my photos. You can even automatically apply tags to imported photos. Later, I export all my processed photos to Flickr[1] (1TB of space for free) and use their albums, tags, geolocation features to categorize them further. By processed photos, I mean photo I have reworked with DT (so not all my pictures, but the ones that really matter). [1] https://www.flickr.com https://www.flickr.com

melicerte 9y ago

I forgot to mention that DT support lua scripting[1] which might help you to further automate some steps of your photo management process.The Lua API is fairly complete. You can also grap some existing lua plugin like the one who can export/import to GIMP. [1] https://www.darktable.org/lua-api/ https://www.darktable.org/lua-api/ and https://github.com/darktable-org/lua-scripts https://github.com/darktable-org/lua-scripts

PuffinBlue 9y ago

No. They're all poor in some way. Lightroom is closest, especially with the latest uodate to improve speed in the Classic CC version. Other than that there are exceptional importers like Photomechnic ($$$) or Rapid Photo Downloader (free) but photo managers are all poor. Its unbelievable too. All it needs is a free version of lightrooms librart module that works on the embedded raw jpegs (like Photomechnic and Rapid Photo Downloader) and it would win photo management. Im learning to code with part of the motivation being I'm going to make my own that actually works because its so easy to see whats needed. By next christmas i hooe to have a rough first working attempt.