(Re: darkroom...)
(25-12-2015, 03:22 AM)artur0shaik Wrote: But why? That's great RAW files editor. Here is some of my work made for fun with this app: https://500px.com/ashaihullin
And they just released version 2. While I obviously can't speak for ninjacharlie, I had a similar reaction to darktable and can share the notes I wrote at the time.
First, some disclaimers: - This was written a little over 6 months ago, and reflects the darktable build available in the Fedora 20 distro repository at the time. It may be out of date. You say they released a version 2, which for all I know addresses all of these issues.
- It's possible that problems I encountered were specific to Fedora's build of darktable, or to my system, and that others may have a better experience.
- It's certainly true that some of the complaints are subjective, and that others may not care about things which bothered me. I'm sharing purely my own impressions, which should be taken at face value.
- This is not some sort of crusade, and I do not have it "in" for darktable. I am not in the habit of indiscriminately trashing software. While I have used Lightroom in a cursory fashion, I am not particularly experienced or familiar with it. Plenty of free-software criticism is, "I expect this to be identical to $COMMERCIAL_PACKAGE, and will see any deviation as a fault." This is not that.
- Finally, as the text below explains, I was not working with RAW files from a high-end DSLR, but rather JPGs taken with a consumer-level pocket camera. In some ways, darktable was overpowered for my purposes, though given the problems I encountered it certainly appeared more underpowered than over, and I'd hate to see how it handled a library of bigger, higher-res files instead. (But, again, for all I know it would've handled that better, and the fact that I was using non-professional-quality files was the problem.)
With all that out of the way, here are my thoughts regarding my attempt to use darktable to work with a set of photos. An attempt that was ultimatly abandoned, in favor of shotwell being "good enough" and far less frustrating. (Oh, and apologies for any salty language I missed, I tried to clean it up but I'm from NYC and swear like a sailor in everyday conversation. Nothing should be inferred from that.)
Quote:OK, so Darktable (a Linux photo collection/processing application along the lines of Adobe Lightroom / Apple Aperture) is just not working out.
The typical free-software+big-project complaints are there.
• The interface, while trying too hard to look like Lightroom, is just wonky enough to annoy.
• Keyboard shorcuts (while customizable) are just nonsensically weird and uncomfortable — in the single-image view, the default keys to advance to the next image / back up to the previous one are Space and Backspace!?! #NOPE
• Even in single-image view, it observes mousing on the filmstrip and applies shortcuts to the _hovered_ image, so if you've accidentally left your pointer in the wrong place then you've just rejected/rated/whatevered some image other than the one you're currently viewing.
• The image collection mode has lots of view customizations, which are one-time operations instead of actual modes. Frex, there's a grouping feature to pull together multiple images into a group. And there's a view option to collapse groups, so that the entire group shows as just one tile. (Not super useful anyway, since the group is shown as just the first grouped image with an easily-overlooked "G" superimposed; there's no clear indication that it's a group, no indication at all how many images are in the group, and if you select on that tile in collapsed view it doesn't actually select ALL of the images in the group, only the first one... which is braindead.) But when you're in collapsed-group view and you CREATE a new group, what happens? Absolutely nothing. Any newly-created groups will still display un-collapsed until you try turning it off and on again... "it" being the collapsed-groups view.
*mumbledrone*
But still, all of that would be merely shrug-and-bear-it tolerable. What REALLY ruins things is the caching/updating implementation and performance.
Look, I realize working with entire libraries of images is a heavy task, hell even Lightroom is slow as a dog. But Darktable, at least the current Fedora 20 build, isn't simply slow, it's brain-damaged. The collection view will go into these PAROXYSMS of endless thumbnail-refreshing, where some random bunch of the visible images will just start blinking on and off like strobe lights, repeatedly getting updated for no discernible reason and making it effectively impossible to see or do anything with them. Other tiles will just sit there empty, thumbnails never being drawn even if you hover or select the tile in question.
...This is on a quad-core machine with 6GB of RAM (2GB of which is being eaten by Gnome Shell & Firefox, admittedly), working with a library of < 200 snapshot-camera JPEG images — no RAW or anything — of 4000x3000 pixels each, and it occurred both with the default memory configs, and even after I doubled the cache size to see if it would help any. (Spoiler Alert: No.)
For the record, I ended up switching to Shotwell, which doesn't have much in the way of photo-processing features I wasn't using anyway, but is a MUCH more efficient collection manager/browser. Even better, a Publish plugin lets me shove the whole (preened&semi-organized) pile into a Picasa Web Album, so I can just deal with them there.
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