3 ms·

I've been trying to migrate my flow from Lightroom to purely OSS tools. So far I've landed on a big mess of importing RAW with the gphoto2 CLI so that I've got

by frio 7y ago

I've been trying to migrate my flow from Lightroom to purely OSS tools. So far I've landed on a big mess of importing RAW with the gphoto2 CLI so that I've got a reliable archive to then feed the other tools: digiKam for active library management of the shots I want to develop, Rawtherapee and Darktable for processing, and then the GIMP for final touchups. As much as I find Adobe distasteful, it's a much, much smoother experience. If you don't mind hacking away to find a workflow that works for you, you'll get similar results out of open source tools -- but the path to those results is much longer.

brudgers 7y ago
Darktable and Rawtherapee support many RAW formats directly. Gimp supports many RAW formats with a plugin. For those workflows, preprocessing with libgphoto2 may not be required.
- frio 7y ago
  gphoto2 is more for archival. For whatever reason it feels safer to me to use the CLI as a feeder for the other apps; gphoto2 grabs the photos off the camera, pops them in a folder, and I then import into digiKam from there rather than from the camera. The archive is independently backed up and remains a pristine home for all my digital negatives, without the risk of me annihilating things in digiKam/Darktable, which I am wont to do ;).
  - brudgers 7y ago
    That makes sense. I use Rapid Photo Downloader to ingest images. It handles renaming, directory creation, and teeing the data stream to a primary and a backup location. https://www.damonlynch.net/rapid/ https://www.damonlynch.net/rapid/ It replaced shell my scripts about two years ago. Periodically, I archive the online disks to an offline disk. When the online backup disk is full, I archive it and buy another. Likewise with the SD cards from the camera, I shoot until they are full and then archive them. I don't delete images off of them and replace them when full. I treat SD cards as a consumable...like film.
    - frio 7y ago
      Thanks for the link, I'll take a look :).

by frio 7y ago

brudgers 7y ago

Darktable and Rawtherapee support many RAW formats directly. Gimp supports many RAW formats with a plugin. For those workflows, preprocessing with libgphoto2 may not be required.

frio 7y ago
gphoto2 is more for archival. For whatever reason it feels safer to me to use the CLI as a feeder for the other apps; gphoto2 grabs the photos off the camera, pops them in a folder, and I then import into digiKam from there rather than from the camera. The archive is independently backed up and remains a pristine home for all my digital negatives, without the risk of me annihilating things in digiKam/Darktable, which I am wont to do ;).
- brudgers 7y ago
  That makes sense. I use Rapid Photo Downloader to ingest images. It handles renaming, directory creation, and teeing the data stream to a primary and a backup location. https://www.damonlynch.net/rapid/ https://www.damonlynch.net/rapid/ It replaced shell my scripts about two years ago. Periodically, I archive the online disks to an offline disk. When the online backup disk is full, I archive it and buy another. Likewise with the SD cards from the camera, I shoot until they are full and then archive them. I don't delete images off of them and replace them when full. I treat SD cards as a consumable...like film.
  - frio 7y ago
    Thanks for the link, I'll take a look :).