> Darktable is however, bad at photograpy organization and collections.

It's like saying Microsoft Word is bad as an IDE. That's because it's not and IDE.

And Darktable is very explicit that it is not for photography organization and collections.

If Capture One or any other buy-once commercial offering worked at all under Wine (or, in a dream land, had a Linux build), I would happily pay for it. But unfortunately, I've had no luck getting either Capture One or DxO PhotoLab running on Linux.

I struggle with Darktable's workflow, but it works without issue on Fedora with Wayland (including with my monitor's color calibration), so I'm sticking with it for now.

Not getting into which solution is better, but Capture One is at least 50% more expensive than Lightroom. It's a material difference.

Private equity owed proprietary Mac and Windows exclusive. No thanks.

Don't lead people down a fruitless path. From their own FAQ:

>Is darktable a free Lightroom alternative?¶ Yes and no. Darktable is an alternative to Lightroom the same way any other raw editor is, since it edits raw files, but it would be a mistake to think it’s a direct replacement. Other than both being raw editors with photo library management, and looking somewhat similar, they have very little in common.

What they mean is, Darktable has very capable editing functionality, but its "library management" is such an afterthought that I would challenge whether it even deserves to be called library management. It seems to be oriented around the design philosophy that photographers should be organizing their library with CLI tools.

Pretty sure Darktable only supports openCL and not Metal for MacOS.

OpenCL is unsupported for M1/2/3/4/5, which makes RAW file processing, batch workflows, basically everything, unusably slow.

Unless something has changed in the past few months, Darktable is dead on MacOS with no fix in sight.

> The way they do it, unfortunately, is by maintaining every previous version of the processing pipeline.

A LOT of professional software does this. It’s one of the biggest moats they have to customers switching.

I’d pay to see what software like Parasolid does to manage fourty years of backwards compatibility (CAD models made 30+ years ago have to come out exactly the same).

Killer feature is intuitive UX. Using DarkTable was an exercise in frustration for me.

In darkroom mode you can’t navigate to other photos with cursor keys. Since the cursor keys do nothing else I have no idea why the aren’t bound to the nav. You have to double click on a photo to select it, one click does nothing so again I have no idea why not just bind single click to select. Then it recenters the entire row on what you selected, which I find disorientating but I suppose because you can’t navigate with cursor keys this recentering is necessary.

If you are willing to read the manuals and relearn everything it can do what it’s supposed to but the UX of LR is worth it to me.

Foss alternatives generally handle this by either not changing the format too much or by making old versions available to download in perpetuity and then you can manually upgrade your decades old library at your leisure. I'm really glad they don't spend their already limited resources on trying to handle every possible old library file under the sun, as long as you've got incremental upgrades working you've got a path. And if you are not using it on timescales that would allow for incremental upgrades you are not the ICP anyway so they've made a good engineering decision.

>How do the FOSS alternatives handle this?

In the same way, because there's no other way. Darktable in particular contains previous versions of the color pipeline. Every RAW software does that.

> What solutions have you found?

* Putting the photos in folders, based on dates and event name. * over a decade ago I used digiKam in parallelle with Darktable.

Depends on what feature of Lightroom you use. Give it a try and see for yourself.

Better in some areas but also very frustrating in others.

RapidRaw is too much AI-focused, with the typical drawback that you cannot tell the AI that it is wrong. You want to remove something from the photo by inpainting something else over it, and the only way to do it in RapidRaw is to brush over what you want to remove and pray that the object is removed cleanly by AI. But often, the AI leaves even worse artifacts, and the low-tech solution, that is, manually selecting what you want to copy over, is not available.

Another issue is that the overblown highlight reconstruction is much worse than in DarkTable.

    Ansel is what Darktable 4.0 could have been if it didn’t die of feature creep .

    Between 2020 and 2023, Darktable has suffered massive code additions of peripheral features, often ill-coded, poorly designed and penalizing usability, performance and maintenance. Too many workarounds failed to fix bugs, but layered new problems on top of legacy code : welcome in maintenance nightmare.

Looks interesting - does it have better library management than DarkTable?

I am always amazed at how much Aurelian Pierre is able to produce. But I think he is too smart for his own good and also too opinionated to be a good leader of an open source community.

Makes me admire Linus Thorvalds even more. He is super smart, opinionated by also was able to keep a huge community on track for decades.

I haven't heard of either, but have been hoping for a replacement for Aperture for years. Having no knowledge of the history here, reading the `ansel` github page sounds like the developer has some animosity towards `darktable`. Does anyone have any experience with both? Or more knowledge of the history here?

Is the last release on GitHub from 2022 or is it me?

> Meet Chantal, your image processing AI librarian

Instant pass.

Edit: This appears to be their 'knowledgebase' and not something baked into the app.