Depends on what you want to do, if you want the edited photo in an external program, you can export it with a click to the open it elsewhere (and re-import it b

Depends on what you want to do, if you want the edited photo in an external program, you can export it with a click to the open it elsewhere (and re-import it back if you need). If you want to do raw edits, you'll need to make sure changes are synced via a sidecar XMP file, but I'm not sure what things will overlap or not with external programs. So you can use Darktable for organization and then do edits elsewhere, if that's what you want, though Darktable is more about its editing capabilities than as a database. It does give you tagging and do all that too. You can also extend with LUA, so probably you can have a simple script to automate any trip out to another program (I've seen some for doing things like HDR editing, for instance).