Tag Archives: Darktable

Switching from Lightroom to Darktable on macOS

I started my digital photography life with a Nikon D80 and Lightroom 1.0 quite a while ago (2007). When Adobe stopped selling copies and only provided subscription options was one of the moments it became very clear that an alternative is needed. Let’s not talk about Lightroom CC, its unstable desktop app, and a recent user nightmare.

To be independent from the business needs of a company, the only option is to go for an alternative that is licensed under an Open Source license. With that preference in mind and if it is about RAW processing, you have the choice between digiKam, RawTherapee, and darktable.

I was following darktable since a few years. The 2.x versions have not really been working for me. In contrast the releases of 3.0 and 3.2 have been milestones in growing darktable into a serious and easy to use – not to say even more mature – alternative to Lightroom and it is time to do the final switch. Now or never.

To share it upfront: I did not get disappointed nor frustrated by this decision. I am just wondering, why the hell did I not switch earlier?

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HowTo: Bulk exporting all of your image collections from Lightroom to a folder-based structure

Do you plan to switch from Adobe Lightroom to a different image management and raw editor, like its free alternatives darktable or RawTherapee? One of the main challenges is to preserve your carefully created collections’ structure whilst migrating. Ideally via the file system represented by a hierarchical folder structure to be independent from whatever software you choose.

As I am currently abandoning Lightroom, I have written a Bash-script to accomplish this task:

https://github.com/apfelkraut/ExportLRCatalog

For details please refer to the README.

HowTo: My journey through self-hosted photo gallery approaches

Quite soon after creating this blog I found that it is also the perfect place to present selections of my photographs.

During that time I was already using Adobe Lightroom. If I remember correctly it was still version 1.X, but it already had a convenient one-click solution to create web-based galleries out of a collection of photos. So I could easily create one and upload the resulting folder to my webserver. I even was able to customize the generated configuration file in order to modify the title and description of the Flash-based gallery player. And here comes the downside. It was based on Shockwave/Macromedia/Adobe Flash, a nightmare regarding security and stability. Aside from this, mobile devices have become more and more popular that did not support Flash and introduced a completely different way on how to interact with a website. Remember the first time when you were using a swipe gesture to browse through images? An this Responsive web design that allowed you to view webpages and its elements in a size that fit well the screen of your device and not vice versa?

Continue reading HowTo: My journey through self-hosted photo gallery approaches