[IgorPartola]

I guess I am in the minority but I did not have a good time with Darktable. I used it for a few years and then had to hold my nose and transition to Lightroom. On decent hardware (MacBook Pro that was only a few years old) it was dog slow. But the worst part was transitioning from their version 2 to version 3 of the workflow or whatever they called it. None of my old photos would render correctly after that and half of the modules I learned to use to edit my photos were not obsolete.

The documentation for it is dense. It’s like you need to know the inner workings of the software to be able to do things like basic color correction. And even basic masking was just awkward as hell. When I quit it did not have smart object detection either so removing things from the background required editing the photo in external software.

Lightroom isn’t perfect. But it is fast, it is intuitive, and it does not expose modules that the documentation says to never use.

I really wish I could use open source software for this. But I have yet to find a good alternative that lets me do what I want (which is fairly basic, I don’t go crazy with my editing) that doesn’t require me to get a Masters degree in its usage.

[yonatan8070]

> Lightroom isn’t perfect. But it is fast

I'm not a Lightroom user myself, but my mom is a photographer and uses Lightroom for all of her photos and at least on her PC, it became extremely slow and painful to use. And it's not like it's a super outdated system either, it has a Ryzen 5600G, RTX 4060, 32GB RAM, nothing too ancient...

We even tried contacting Adobe support, and they claimed that the catalog was corrupted, took the catalog file, and later retured a "fixed" version which had no effect.

They then blamed Windows 10 and suggested we upgrade to 11. Does anyone here have any better tips to get it running more smoothly?

[MoonWalk]

You are in good company. I went into Darktable enthusiastically and with willingness to learn its workflow.

What I found was crippling bugs and a piss-poor UI. I've even gone back to it after a few years to see if I'd soften my stance, but nope: It blows.

Part of my beef with it is discussed below; people are acknowledging that it sucks at organizing (and, I submit, browsing). But it purports to do it, so you waste time wrestling with its ineptitude.

[epihelix]

The lack of easy browsing is an issue, but Darktable has never purported to provide an image browser / organizer. Quite the contrary, the devs have always been crystal clear that they hate the concept with a fiery passion.