6 ms·

Really glad there's advanced open-source tools like darktable and RawTherapee. I've switched back and forth between RawTherapee and darktable for a few years n

Really glad there's advanced open-source tools like darktable and RawTherapee. I've switched back and forth between RawTherapee and darktable for a few years now. I prefer the UI and workflow or RT, but dt has better performance on my machine. And RT has this strange longstanding bug where the image is extremely blurry during editing, and only becomes clear after exporting. According to a github issue, a workaround is to disable lens correction (and anything else in the "transform" tab) but this didn't work for me, prompting my most recent switch to dt. current biggest grip with dt... why are those damn arrows at the edges of the screen so tiny??? Expanding and retracting the side panels requires pixel-perfect accuracy on a ~20px target. I know I could use keyboard shortcuts, but my brain isn't wired for them yet.

moelf 4y ago
I wish the effort is united between dt and rt (and maybe digiKam for management), then we'd have a Blender-level competitor against LightRoom maybe
- TaylorAlexander 4y ago
  This reminds me, I upgraded to the latest Ubuntu LTS and now digikam won’t open! This is with the latest app image, and there is some system library version mismatch. I looked up a bug report for the same error message that came up on a different program, and it seems app image isn’t as self contained as I thought! I recently bought a used Canon Pro 100 printer and was having fun printing my photos until this bug preventing me from opening digiKam!
  - Elv13 4y ago
    AppImages are only as self-contained as the author put effort into making them self-contained. There's also upper limits to how self-contained they are. While some terminal and bitmap only X11 app can be compiled as static binaries, anything that depends on system libraries needs to be compiled with an older version of glibc. The best example is libGl (GLX or EGL) for hardware 3D acceleration or libvdpau for hardware media decoding. You can't just bundle those, you have to use the system ones. Using any system library forces you to use glibc (AppImage don't work on Alpine). OpenSSL and a few other a libs you usually want to use the system one and have a built-in fallback because of security concerns. Making perfect AppImages is often possible, but the automated tooling isn't smart enough. A proper AppImage (this one is by me) look like this: https://github.com/Elv13/reclaimail/blob/master/docker-editorbuilder/Dockerfile https://github.com/Elv13/reclaimail/blob/master/docker-edito... . Obviously this doesn't scale very well to projects with 300 dependencies like Digikam. My NeoVIM appimage linked above "really, really" bundles all dependency and compile your NeoVIM config to luajit bytecode. It's 3.9mb compared to the upstream one which is 15mb without any config. Note than 0.7mb of that 3.9 is the spellcheck dictionary, 0.4 my enormous config, 0.5 the AppImage overhead and 0.7 all the legacy plugins still written in vimscript.
    - TaylorAlexander 4y ago
      Interesting. Yeah it seems like the solution for digikam on my solution was something like unpack the app image and recompile something and I’ve not had the time to mess with it. I hope the maintainer can release a fixed image at some point. I really like that app!
      - account42 4y ago
        Wouldn't another option be to use the system package [0] or is the version too old? Or use the Flatpak [1] (or NIH-flatpak [2]), which is probably a better fit than AppImage for GUI programs that sit on top of a heavy toolkit. [0] https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=digikam https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=digikam [1] https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.kde.digikam https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.kde.digikam [2] https://snapcraft.io/digikam https://snapcraft.io/digikam
- spaetzleesser 4y ago
  A merger between digiKam and darktable would be my dream.
- Derbasti 4y ago
  They collaborate a lot, actually. Many algorithms are ported from one to the other, if they work well and fit.
thg 4y ago
> current biggest grip with dt... why are those damn arrows at the edges of the screen so tiny??? Expanding and retracting the side panels requires pixel-perfect accuracy on a ~20px target. I know I could use keyboard shortcuts, but my brain isn't wired for them yet. You can make them bigger through some CSS tweaks: https://docs.darktable.org/usermanual/development/en/preferences-settings/general/ https://docs.darktable.org/usermanual/development/en/prefere...
- sneak 4y ago
  It's open source, you can change anything. The UI shouldn't be so annoying and hostile out of the box regardless. I reported this issue on irc years ago and the dev response was so hostile I abandoned trying to use it and never looked back. I pay Adobe $500/year for software that had been tested by users with developers silently watching.
  - michaelmrose 4y ago
    Most projects have an issue tracker where one proposes changes or reports bugs. The IRC channel is labeled "Support channel for darktable" rather than "Tell the developer how they ought to better serve me for free" People have a finite slice of their life to give you for nothing. Putting specific suggestions on the issue tracker seems more respectful of their time.
    - iasay 4y ago
      I raised a ticket on an open source project about a defect. It was open for 6 months with no comment. So I fixed it and did a PR. The PR was still sitting there open after 6 months. More interesting PRs to the developers have been merged. Attention and stewardship are not universal.
      - rglullis 4y ago
        What I usually do when I see promising projects and slow devs. 1. "This one issue is what is stopping me from using this product. Is this current method preferred by your users or do you have any other reason to not want to change?" 2. "The proprietary solution costs $X per month. Is there any way to sponsor development? I am willing to give $X/n (where n is whatever number you are comfortable with) per month to get this issue merged and to have some sort of prioritization when triaging issues. 3. Failing those: write a blog post and propose a fork. This is usually the quickest way to get a reaction from narcissistic developers.
jseliger 4y ago
I'm also glad it exists but have never figured out how to use it on MacOS. I believe I somehow imported my entire /pictures folder at some point, producing many thousands of images in a film roll; I just downloaded 4.0.0 and have spent some time trying to figure out how to reset the film roll, or darktable altogether. Or how to create a new library. There's no typical top toolbar on MacOS. In clicking around, I've selected "add to library," and darktable is now beachballed. CaptureOne will continue to be my default. (Before someone points this out, let me acknowledge that the apparent problems with darktable are undoubtedly my fault in some capacity and that I'm Using It Wrong, or that I can't properly read the manual, or that I should watch more videos on how to use darktable.)
- brudgers 4y ago
  To reset Darktable’s databases, delete the two databases (files ending in “.db”) in the equivalent to ~/.config/darktable on your Mac. One contains your custom configurations like presets, the other contains info about file locations, ratings, film rolls, etc. Deleting and reimport takes time when a lot of files are involved, but is my preferred way of handling the changes of large scale file operations. But film rolls might not be the best way to manage files. After six years, I found searching the database using tags and Exif data such as camera and date ranges with the collection tool works better for me. What also helps me is never deleting or moving an image file. That way the database stays current and I avoid the busy work of file and folder manager. To put it another way, for me flat search is better than hierarchy navigation.
- Normille 4y ago
  >I'm also glad it exists but have never figured out how to use it on MacOS Same here. I just downloaded V4 to see if there was any improvement from last time I tried to use it * Open app, Select 'Add to Library' --> spinning beachball of doom delete the ~/.config/darktable directory, to give me a clean start... * Open app. App opens in a weird window the full width of my screen but only half the depth. I try to resize the window. It won't rezise, even though I get resize arrows when hovering over the corner. Finally manage to make it usable by hitting the fullscreen widget. * Try 'Add to Library' again. This time it allows me to select my photos archive folder. I see there's a tickbox marked 'Recursive' so I click on that as I have subfolders in my photos archive. I can't select the box. Then the spinning beachball of doom starts again... * Force quit * Delete app. Life's just too short to mess about with an app that hangs twice, requiring a force quit, before I've even managed to do a single thing with it.
hef19898 4y ago
Darktable is great! This year I restarted photography, ina serious manner, after quite some time. Serious as in I try to get beautiful pictures I could hang on a wall. I also started to do proper post processing, and darktable is quite handy. My dad used to be a pro photographer, now retired, and gave me crash course in RAW processing. Besides some handling differences between lightroom and photoshop he nothing negative to say about darktable. And neither do I, it's not darktables fault that my photo library is a mess.
- humanlion87 4y ago
  Does your dad have any suggestion on resources/books that others can use to learn the same crash course he gave you? :)
  - hef19898 4y ago
    Hevcertainly does, in fact besides years of experience he has quite a number of books at home. All in German so... If that's ok I can ask!
    - humanlion87 4y ago
      Thank you for the offer! Unfortunately I don't know German, so don't want to trouble you.
      - hef19898 4y ago
        Ah, a pity... If you don't know yet, photography life . com has some good resources to get started!
Derbasti 4y ago
There are also shortcuts for the arrow panels. Ctrl-Shift-{T,B,L,R}, IIRC (top, bottom, left, right).

moelf 4y ago

I wish the effort is united between dt and rt (and maybe digiKam for management), then we'd have a Blender-level competitor against LightRoom maybe

TaylorAlexander 4y ago
This reminds me, I upgraded to the latest Ubuntu LTS and now digikam won’t open! This is with the latest app image, and there is some system library version mismatch. I looked up a bug report for the same error message that came up on a different program, and it seems app image isn’t as self contained as I thought! I recently bought a used Canon Pro 100 printer and was having fun printing my photos until this bug preventing me from opening digiKam!
- Elv13 4y ago
  AppImages are only as self-contained as the author put effort into making them self-contained. There's also upper limits to how self-contained they are. While some terminal and bitmap only X11 app can be compiled as static binaries, anything that depends on system libraries needs to be compiled with an older version of glibc. The best example is libGl (GLX or EGL) for hardware 3D acceleration or libvdpau for hardware media decoding. You can't just bundle those, you have to use the system ones. Using any system library forces you to use glibc (AppImage don't work on Alpine). OpenSSL and a few other a libs you usually want to use the system one and have a built-in fallback because of security concerns. Making perfect AppImages is often possible, but the automated tooling isn't smart enough. A proper AppImage (this one is by me) look like this: https://github.com/Elv13/reclaimail/blob/master/docker-editorbuilder/Dockerfile https://github.com/Elv13/reclaimail/blob/master/docker-edito... . Obviously this doesn't scale very well to projects with 300 dependencies like Digikam. My NeoVIM appimage linked above "really, really" bundles all dependency and compile your NeoVIM config to luajit bytecode. It's 3.9mb compared to the upstream one which is 15mb without any config. Note than 0.7mb of that 3.9 is the spellcheck dictionary, 0.4 my enormous config, 0.5 the AppImage overhead and 0.7 all the legacy plugins still written in vimscript.
  - TaylorAlexander 4y ago
    Interesting. Yeah it seems like the solution for digikam on my solution was something like unpack the app image and recompile something and I’ve not had the time to mess with it. I hope the maintainer can release a fixed image at some point. I really like that app!
    - account42 4y ago
      Wouldn't another option be to use the system package [0] or is the version too old? Or use the Flatpak [1] (or NIH-flatpak [2]), which is probably a better fit than AppImage for GUI programs that sit on top of a heavy toolkit. [0] https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=digikam https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=digikam [1] https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.kde.digikam https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.kde.digikam [2] https://snapcraft.io/digikam https://snapcraft.io/digikam
spaetzleesser 4y ago
A merger between digiKam and darktable would be my dream.
Derbasti 4y ago
They collaborate a lot, actually. Many algorithms are ported from one to the other, if they work well and fit.

thg 4y ago

> current biggest grip with dt... why are those damn arrows at the edges of the screen so tiny??? Expanding and retracting the side panels requires pixel-perfect accuracy on a ~20px target. I know I could use keyboard shortcuts, but my brain isn't wired for them yet. You can make them bigger through some CSS tweaks: https://docs.darktable.org/usermanual/development/en/preferences-settings/general/ https://docs.darktable.org/usermanual/development/en/prefere...

sneak 4y ago
It's open source, you can change anything. The UI shouldn't be so annoying and hostile out of the box regardless. I reported this issue on irc years ago and the dev response was so hostile I abandoned trying to use it and never looked back. I pay Adobe $500/year for software that had been tested by users with developers silently watching.
- michaelmrose 4y ago
  Most projects have an issue tracker where one proposes changes or reports bugs. The IRC channel is labeled "Support channel for darktable" rather than "Tell the developer how they ought to better serve me for free" People have a finite slice of their life to give you for nothing. Putting specific suggestions on the issue tracker seems more respectful of their time.
  - iasay 4y ago
    I raised a ticket on an open source project about a defect. It was open for 6 months with no comment. So I fixed it and did a PR. The PR was still sitting there open after 6 months. More interesting PRs to the developers have been merged. Attention and stewardship are not universal.
    - rglullis 4y ago
      What I usually do when I see promising projects and slow devs. 1. "This one issue is what is stopping me from using this product. Is this current method preferred by your users or do you have any other reason to not want to change?" 2. "The proprietary solution costs $X per month. Is there any way to sponsor development? I am willing to give $X/n (where n is whatever number you are comfortable with) per month to get this issue merged and to have some sort of prioritization when triaging issues. 3. Failing those: write a blog post and propose a fork. This is usually the quickest way to get a reaction from narcissistic developers.

jseliger 4y ago

I'm also glad it exists but have never figured out how to use it on MacOS. I believe I somehow imported my entire /pictures folder at some point, producing many thousands of images in a film roll; I just downloaded 4.0.0 and have spent some time trying to figure out how to reset the film roll, or darktable altogether. Or how to create a new library. There's no typical top toolbar on MacOS. In clicking around, I've selected "add to library," and darktable is now beachballed. CaptureOne will continue to be my default. (Before someone points this out, let me acknowledge that the apparent problems with darktable are undoubtedly my fault in some capacity and that I'm Using It Wrong, or that I can't properly read the manual, or that I should watch more videos on how to use darktable.)

brudgers 4y ago
To reset Darktable’s databases, delete the two databases (files ending in “.db”) in the equivalent to ~/.config/darktable on your Mac. One contains your custom configurations like presets, the other contains info about file locations, ratings, film rolls, etc. Deleting and reimport takes time when a lot of files are involved, but is my preferred way of handling the changes of large scale file operations. But film rolls might not be the best way to manage files. After six years, I found searching the database using tags and Exif data such as camera and date ranges with the collection tool works better for me. What also helps me is never deleting or moving an image file. That way the database stays current and I avoid the busy work of file and folder manager. To put it another way, for me flat search is better than hierarchy navigation.
Normille 4y ago
>I'm also glad it exists but have never figured out how to use it on MacOS Same here. I just downloaded V4 to see if there was any improvement from last time I tried to use it * Open app, Select 'Add to Library' --> spinning beachball of doom delete the ~/.config/darktable directory, to give me a clean start... * Open app. App opens in a weird window the full width of my screen but only half the depth. I try to resize the window. It won't rezise, even though I get resize arrows when hovering over the corner. Finally manage to make it usable by hitting the fullscreen widget. * Try 'Add to Library' again. This time it allows me to select my photos archive folder. I see there's a tickbox marked 'Recursive' so I click on that as I have subfolders in my photos archive. I can't select the box. Then the spinning beachball of doom starts again... * Force quit * Delete app. Life's just too short to mess about with an app that hangs twice, requiring a force quit, before I've even managed to do a single thing with it.

hef19898 4y ago

Darktable is great! This year I restarted photography, ina serious manner, after quite some time. Serious as in I try to get beautiful pictures I could hang on a wall. I also started to do proper post processing, and darktable is quite handy. My dad used to be a pro photographer, now retired, and gave me crash course in RAW processing. Besides some handling differences between lightroom and photoshop he nothing negative to say about darktable. And neither do I, it's not darktables fault that my photo library is a mess.

humanlion87 4y ago
Does your dad have any suggestion on resources/books that others can use to learn the same crash course he gave you? :)
- hef19898 4y ago
  Hevcertainly does, in fact besides years of experience he has quite a number of books at home. All in German so... If that's ok I can ask!
  - humanlion87 4y ago
    Thank you for the offer! Unfortunately I don't know German, so don't want to trouble you.
    - hef19898 4y ago
      Ah, a pity... If you don't know yet, photography life . com has some good resources to get started!

Derbasti 4y ago

There are also shortcuts for the arrow panels. Ctrl-Shift-{T,B,L,R}, IIRC (top, bottom, left, right).