Darktable is fantastic, and their darktable-cli is really clutch as a photographer turned SWE.

If coming from lightroom or the likes it does take some dedicated learning to adapt to the "Darktable" ways of doing things. Deceptively similar UI, yet very different approaches and naming.

Darktable is however, bad at photograpy organization and collections. Something Lightroom shines at.

Built many processes around it for my own post-processing needs.

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

It has a very clunky UX for this. But it actually has a lot of useful features for organizing large amounts of photos. There's a guy Bruce Williams on Youtube who has been doing tutorials on Youtube for Darktable for many years that has many relevant videos on this topic. But you can do rule based collections with filters on tags, camera type, and whatever other meta data is there.

It's probably a bit different from what you are used to and IMHO it's over engineered and there are some bad ideas for usability that never really got addressed and are made worse by the developers just putting buttons and controls in all the wrong places. But once you get over that, it actually does have a lot of powerful features for getting organized.

There's actually a fork of Darktable called Ansel that addresses a lot of the UX issues that has been in the works for a few years. The creator of the fork got annoyed with the level of indifference on this topic. There were other reasons as well (he was the creator of the filmic module in Darktable). But most of his UX work at least looks to me as something that the Darktable people might consider adopting.

> 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.