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)
Most users don’t care about the features DT has over LR, that’s the point. If DT truly was the superior alternative, it would skyrocket in popularity like other open source software done right, like VLC.
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.
… You just said it would be a fair comparison if we gave Darktable 13 years, and now that I’ve basically given you that comparison by simply going back 13 years and comparing VLC then with Darktable now, you’re moving the goalposts and saying "actually you can’t compare the two at all because they’re different software". So… which is it?
No one’s disputing that the UI of a video player is simpler than photo editing software-- the point though is that among video players, VLC is king because it’s so user friendly. Devs work around user requests/feedback, while Darktable’s approach is "the users can work around how we think the program should work".
Again, I just find it interesting that you started off by saying one can compare VLC with Darktable, but only if we give Darktable 13 years to have the same amount of development time as VLC-- but when we basically achieve that by comparing VLC’s user friendliness 13 years ago to Darktable’s user friendliness today, suddenly it’s not a fair comparison anymore because… new reasons.
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?
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.
Darktable can do things Lightroom has not even considered
I agree, but that doesn’t change the fact that Darktable is far from being as user friendly as LR.
Got an example? I like darktable, although figuring out which modules to use is definitely a bit of a learning curve
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.
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)
lsdoesn’t paginate.Most users don’t care about the features DT has over LR, that’s the point. If DT truly was the superior alternative, it would skyrocket in popularity like other open source software done right, like VLC.
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.
Except VLC 13 years ago is still far more user friendly than Darktable today.
Also, oranges are better than apples. Another unfair comparison.
The UI features and functionality of a video player is a lot simpler than something like Darktable or Lightroom.
… You just said it would be a fair comparison if we gave Darktable 13 years, and now that I’ve basically given you that comparison by simply going back 13 years and comparing VLC then with Darktable now, you’re moving the goalposts and saying "actually you can’t compare the two at all because they’re different software". So… which is it?
No one’s disputing that the UI of a video player is simpler than photo editing software-- the point though is that among video players, VLC is king because it’s so user friendly. Devs work around user requests/feedback, while Darktable’s approach is "the users can work around how we think the program should work".
Again, I just find it interesting that you started off by saying one can compare VLC with Darktable, but only if we give Darktable 13 years to have the same amount of development time as VLC-- but when we basically achieve that by comparing VLC’s user friendliness 13 years ago to Darktable’s user friendliness today, suddenly it’s not a fair comparison anymore because… new reasons.
I don’t know why downloading is your killer feature for a RAW development app. But when
lsscrolls too long I usemoreand 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?