22h ago

Call for opinion: Your choice of Shotwell / DigiKam / Darktable

Of course Darktable is not only a photo sorter, but also does a lot of photo touch up 'darkroom' work. Debian system with KDE desktop. i5 with some bargain basement NVIDIA gpu (No, really it does not even have it's own fan).

Which of the 3 do y'all like the best?

Edit - Update - More details:

I am dedicating a laptop to be my "portable darkroom"- My desktop machine is only an i5, this laptop is a nice Asus Vivobook with an i7 in it. I do have Rapid Photo Down Loader (which works well with my camera connected via USB C) Each photo drive or session goes in to a folder named by date 20250309 for today for example. These go inside a year folder. Inside the day folder I put the DCIM folder from the camera. I sort and grade on the computer. I have now tried Darkroom, and it seems to just pile every picture I have into one continuous unsorted stream of pictured with no grouping. I hope the other two do better in that regard.

6 comments

I use Shotwell to organize my photos. It can handle creating folders by date automatically, and allows you to rate and tag. It works well for my needs.

I name and organize my files with rapid photo Downloader then manage them with digikam since I can use my own mariadb and use digikam on multiple computers but it's pretty slow when accessing my photos when not on local network. Then I open the images with darktable from digikam for edits.
I've been going back and forth with maybe using darktable only but digikam has some nice features like renaming everything (I accidentally named my images during reorganizing after lightroom with import date instead of capture date) and they don't seem to interfere with each other.

What is photo sorting? I do not know what Shotwell or DigiKam is.
My workflow (Linux) is I open a file manager on my SD card and let it generate thumbnails. Then I quickly nuke all of the obviously unusable pictures. Then I do another pass where I actually open and look at the images and nuke the ones with flaws I don't want to or can't fix. Then I pull everything remaining into Darktable and play around with the most interesting pictures I took to get them done and finished while I'm motivated and then I'll look at the rest to see if I can make something interesting of them else they get deleted and the cycle begins anew.
- I generally do the same, except I only nuke the ones that were technically bad, many of my pictures are taken from a moving car with little warning so I don't always get my subject anywhere near in frame - those go otherwise I want to really check the rest. They go in a folder that is named by the date the pictures were taken (20250309 for today's) Then if I need to do things I try Gimp first. I just recently got rapid photo downloader too.

I use Darktable for developing Raw-files and DigiKam as a file manager. DigiKam is really basic, but Darktable isn't good for sorting. Not tried Shotwell.

I am a Darktable user and really like it. That said, my workflow is:
get photos off camera
cull. I'm using photo mechanic right now, but if I can find an option that lets you sort my the largest in focus face I'm tempted to switch to something else. I shoot some kids sports and want to make sure I get a few good photos of each kid
move the creme de la creme to their own folder
add that folder to Darktable as it's own thing
edit as necessary in Darktable
I've never tried culling with Darktable. Photo mechanic lets you fly through photos using 1-8 to grade photos. At this point my first pass is to find the "this is a decent photo" shots and my second pass is usually just to pare that down. I've given after shoot a go, and while I can see why a pro would use it (volume), I prefer manually culling with the exception of the kids sports scenario I hit on earlier.

6 comments