• Unpopular opinion: Darktable sucks compared to Lightroom and I say this as someone who despises Adobe. There’s so many simple things that Lightroom gets right that Darktable completely fucks up and it drives me nuts. Just so painfully far from user friendly, intuitive design. For any serious photographer, it pains me to say this but Lightroom is worth that disgusting subscription fee.

        • Something as simple as importing photos on Darktable is just such a pain in the ass compared to Lightroom.

          In Lightroom, it automatically prompts you to import photos when a CD camera’s card is plugged in. You set the import location and it creates nested yearly, monthly and daily photos. When importing, the option to select only new photos is plainly in view. Once importing is done, LR automatically ejects the card.

          Darktable, on the other hand… The whole import and then add to library method is just bizarre. Customization is great but when it just needlessly adds steps to the equation and disrupts what should be a butter smooth workflow, I jump ship. There’s so many things on LR I’ve been able to intuitively figure out while their Darktable equivalent require viewing tutorial after tutorial. It’s so annoying.

          • I don’t really share this experience to be honest, granted I copy my files to my pc manually anyways (I didn’t even know that your method was possible), but darktable has a feature pretty similar to that. “Copy & Import”, I don’t think it pops up automatically when you insert a card, but you can change the folder and the naming and such as you like. You can even ignore non-raw files, an option which I haven’t found in lightroom. So I’m not sure what’s so bizarre about the import tools in darktable, seems pretty similar to lightroom to me.

            Customization is great but when it just needlessly adds steps to the equation and disrupts what should be a butter smooth workflow, I jump ship. There’s so many things on LR I’ve been able to intuitively figure out while their Darktable equivalent require viewing tutorial after tutorial.

            That I kinda do agree with, some things in darktable are definitely more complicated than they should be, I don’t really want to watch a 40 minute tutorial on how to recover shadows from an image and there are also sliders and buttons which seemingly shouldn’t be used. So yeah darktable is less intuitive in that respect, although it works great ones you know what to do (And tbh it’s not that difficult, most tutorials are just excessively long)

              •  jerkface   ( @jerkface@lemmy.ca ) 
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                1 month ago

                I don’t know why downloading is your killer feature for a RAW development app. But when ls scrolls too long I use more and when I need to download thousands of images a week to my NAS and working drive, I use Rapid Image Downloader. You can configure it to kick off automatically when you insert a drive. If that’s your major use case maybe you don’t need LT or DR.

                DR does what it does better than anything else. It’s not as good as other apps at what they do. That’s okay?

              •  Gnumile   ( @Gnumile@lemmy.ca ) 
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                11 month ago

                That’s not really a fair comparison. VLC development started in 1996. Darktable was first released in 2009. Give Darktable another 13 years of development and then you can make that comparison.