[BeetleB]

> Darktable is however, bad at photograpy organization and collections.

It's like saying Microsoft Word is bad as an IDE. That's because it's not and IDE.

And Darktable is very explicit that it is not for photography organization and collections.

[roblh]

You’re right, it’s just that editing and organizing are so tightly coupled that it’s difficult to use something that just ignores one. Like if your oven and sink were on different floors. I want to like darktable, but I need useful organizing built into the program otherwise I just get annoyed. Also the choices of where they put different editing panels are baffling to me. I can never find anything.

Also, an aside. I would love an image editor that would let you build your own chain of editing modules in an arbitrary order. Like audio plugins, with the ability to have more than one instance of each one.

[thewebguyd]

> it’s just that editing and organizing are so tightly coupled that it’s difficult to use something that just ignores one.

This is especially true for professional workflows. I do wedding photography as a side hustle, I shoot anywhere between 15 to 20 weddings/year + a plethora of other sessions (family, portraits, etc.).

The asset management (and plugin ecosystem) are nearly just as important as the RAW processing tools itself. Lightroom (Classic) is even wired up to my gallery delivery service (Pixieset) + ImagenAI for first pass edits.

I've tried and used Darktable in the past. It's already completely capable of being my RAW processor, but it's everything else that's missing that makes my end to end professional workflow possible. The processing/editing tools was never the problem that keeps people locked into Lightroom. It's the decades of plugin development & the asset management features.

[Mashimo]

How are you organizing your photos?

For me it was always just folder based. For example YYYY-MM-DD - Eventname and then have sub folders like raw or export.

[BeetleB]

I felt that way because my prior RAW editing tool did photo organization/collections.

But when I switched to Darktable, I didn't really miss it.

I have a simple organization: Year/description/YYYY-MM-DD/*

(So 2026/yellowstone/2026-06-01/*).

In the end, what matters are the files I export to JPG. It makes sense to use a separate photo organization tool to manage those.

[mcdonje]

You can have multiple instances with Darktable.

[vjvjvjvjghv]

Then they should not even try to have some clunky organization features in Darktable

[jitl]

well then it doesn't sound competitive with software like Lightroom (which its name seems to mirror)