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.

  • @IMALlama
    1•15 hours ago

    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.