The second is the Darkroom where you edit the individual images.īelow I go over a basic workflow that I follow after importing photos into a folder. The first is the lightable – where you view the thumbnail images of all the working files. There are two main windows you will use in Darktable. The power in darktable comes from the ability to edit RAW image data. If you are only shooting in JPEG mode, there is really no need to use a RAW developer (although you still can). I find them to be more responsive and helpful than any of the big software companies, and frankly, they make a better product. Even though it’s free, you can still donate to there cause, and I highly suggest you do if you find their software helpful. The programmers that continually develop darktable are phenomenal and responsive. However, I find it important to keep a the same structure, organized by date.ĭarktable (download available at the link) is an open source RAW developer that is available for all Linux operating systems as well as MacOS, and Windows. For this reason, I often divide days up into many subfolders. The other reason I do this is there are sometimes days that I take thousands of photos, many more than are efficient to load in darktable or other processing software. This is mainly because I don’t find creating folders and copying photos particularly time consuming, and my file-structure predates my use of darktable.

While this method may be convenient for many, I choose to create my file structure manually.

The second reason this feature is nice, is that you can pre-apply creator, publisher, and rights information to the metadata on import (although many cameras let you apply this directly to the images as well). If you were to just dump all of your photos in a single file folder, you would end up with very slow load times in most programs, and may run into problems with duplicates since most cameras just loop through filenames after 9999 photos. It’s good to store photos in separate files by the day because then you usually won’t have too many folders to sort through at a time. One of the benefits to letting darktable import for you is that you will have a consistent file structure for storing your photos. Get my 2023 Alaska Wall Calendar here! To change your import settings including what directory to import to as well as adding creator, publisher, and rights to the metadata on import, go to the “import” tab in the “preferences” menu (the gear wheel in the top menu).

Darktable photo editor tips