[uniclaude]

Definitely agree!

I make a substantial part of my income (just enough to pay rent) selling photography, and I recently dropped ps and lightroom in favor of Darktable. The change didn't happen in a day, but Darktable is so good I don't think I'll ever need to come back to Adobe. Notable plus, I can now spend most of my time on Linux, no more need to use my Macbook for photo work.

The interface is not really good for smaller displays and resolutions (adobe stuff was better on my 11 inch mba), but on anything with more than 1280 x 960 px, it's great.

Congratulations to the Darktable team for this 2.2 release!

[cookiecaper]

I'm sure you're sick of getting asked this, since it's asked every time someone who makes some money from photography mentions it, as there are many wannabe photogs out there, but how do you monetize your photos? Stock photo marketplaces like Dreamtime? Event photography (i.e., getting paid to take photos and provide prints of said photos, not getting paid for photos directly)? Online marketplaces for more artistic-oriented photos like 500px?

Personally my photos provide indirect value. People don't pay for them, but they drive traffic to a property that people pay to use. I've dabbled with the concept of selling them directly or taking more stock-style photos, but never really gotten serious about it.

Again, I know this question is annoying, so if you don't wanna answer, no biggie. :)

[uniclaude]

Many people ask the question indeed!

I sell prints and license photos to a small list of corporate clients I slowly grew with time. I haven't been lucky with marketplaces so far, and I'm doubtful it would be worth the effort with my type of photography (abstract/achitecture).

Any monetization strategy is probably too tied to the corresponding style of photography for any generic advice to make sense. A few of my friends have their income coming mostly (or 100%) from photography, and not three of them monetize the same way. None of them use any marketplace though. Artists, fashion photographers, event photographers, social media content producers, all have a different business model which more often than not looks like classic b2b.

[stevekemp]

A lot of this comes down to your niche. As you say there are many people who are "photographers", and many many many more who would never pay and take their own with their phones.

I accidentally found a niche when I took some fun pictures of a friend who was an escort. She shared them, for advertising purposes, and that lead to my name being mentioned on an escort discussion forum. Since then people get in touch every now and again and I arrange to shoot them in exchange for cash.

Finding people willing to pay is definitely hard, but sadly my own route is pretty hard to generalise.

[pkaye]

Any experience using RawTherapee also? Just an hobbyist myself and moving away from the Mac platform so figuring out the best alternatives.

[stevekemp]

I don't make a living via photography, but I do receive income from taking pictures of escorts, and pets. (Strange how you find your niche!)

I've been using RawTherapee, on Linux, for the past few years. For my needs of marking images, doing post-processing, and mass-operations, it works perfectly.

I'm always reluctant to allow a tool to manage the layout/tagging of my images. So for that I have a strictly sorted hierarchy:

    ~/Images/
    ~/Images/2016
    ~/Images/2016/12/04-Hannah
    ~/Images/2016/12/12-Tiffany

Inside each "event"-folder I store:

    RAW/
    JPG/
    JPG/thumbs/
    Teasers/
    Teasers/thumbs/

Then I write out a meta-data file, ".meta", with detail such as:

    Location=Studio|MyPlace|Their Hotel|Whatever
    Contact-Details=+44...
    Tags=lingerie,nude,shillouette,monochrome
    ..

It works well, and allows me to find files years later via a simple `grep`.

[brudgers]

I am also a hobbyist and I use Darktable. I've experimented with RawTherapee. I like RawTherapee's editing controls and love that its sidecar files are somewhat human readable (Darktable's are not).

What Rawtherapee lacks is the 'light table' feature for handling bulk photographs. I'll often shoot several hundred images in a day (even a blind squirrel finds a nut sometimes). Darktable lets me triage those photos and filter them for processing without managing a file system... well now that my workflow uses RapidPhotoDownloader on the front end. It reads off the memory card and renames files and directories to a standard format.

A few months ago, I brought many years worth of sorted directories of images into Darktable and went to bed and when I woke up it had added everything to the database and I could sort by name and remove duplicates and look at thumbnails and remove junk that had been saved alongside stuff I wanted during bulk operations.

Anyway, since Darktable runs on Mac, there's not a drop dead reason not to give it a spin alongside whatever you're currently using.

[uniclaude]

Never tried RawTherapee, won't be able to help here sorry!