LR was just as perplexing when I first jumped in several years ago. Learning any new piece of software takes time. I erased everything a few times just to start over, clean.Īnd I stumbled a lot. I added a few at a time, never from paid or critical work, so I could learn the new process and get comfortable with what was happening in the software. So what I had was a “collection” – roughly the Darktable equivalent of a LR “catalog” – with only a handful of images. On the laptop, I installed Linux on a partition, leaving Windows and Lightroom in place that would give me access to my LR catalog, which lives on an external hard drive, if need be. I installed the Ubuntu software on both the HP desktop in my home office (wiping out Windows on the HP) and on the Lenovo laptop that I use for travel and working at an office in town. I finally settled, at least tentatively, on a workflow that involves downloading photos off my camera cards onto my photo hard drive with a small but quick program called Rapid Photo Downloader importing them into Darktable, for keywording, raw conversion and image adjustments and, finally, printing them to the 7600 with GIMP, the freeware Photoshop workalike. In fact, the Linux philosophy, inherited from Unix, is using smaller programs that do one thing and do it well. One thing I quickly realized is there still is no one-stop software solution in Linux for my needs. I spent about a week trying out different Linux photo programs and rethinking my photography workflow. And be cheap and reliable and fun.Ī huge bonus would be if I could find a way to pick up the image information from my LR catalog and import it into the new system, so that I would not have to re-keyword everything. Whatever software I used would have to (1) allow me to index my photos in a coherent way (2) let me do raw conversions from Pentax and Canon files (3) make necessary adjustments to those files and (4) manage printing on the 7600. I am not a full time professional, but I regularly sell fine art black and white prints that I make on an old Epson 7600. So in early August I installed Ubuntu 14 – a freeware flavor of Linux maintained by Canonical – on the HP and began to figure out how to make the system work for me and my photography. This time I figured I had nothing to lose. Cursory research a couple years ago convinced me that Linux had no adequate LR replacement. I would have switched some time ago, in fact, had I not been so accustomed to Lightroom. It's free and open source and not nearly as subject to security issues as Windows and Apple systems. I have used Linux before on an old laptop and enjoyed it. Was on the verge of buying a new computer when I thought of trying Linux. I eliminated most common explanations, from dust bunnies to bad RAM and hard drive sectors, reinstalled Windows and Lightroom, and soon after lost close to 200 photos (no, not irreplaceable, or they would have been backed up) when the system suddenly crashed while I was moving photos, in LR, from one drive to another. We're talking blue screen of death crashes. My HP Pavilion computer began to crash unexpectedly and often last spring after I installed Lightroom 6. 1, 2016 – before making up my mind.Īs of today, a month into the experiment, I believe I won't be going back to Adobe and Microsoft.Ī recent portrait. Rather than buy a new machine, I decided to give free Linux photography software a try – and to try it for nearly five months, until Jan. Switching would mean abandoning Lightroom in favor of a Linux equivalent for my 50k digital photos. Darktable v Lightroom: One month into a Pentax photographer's computer/software/photography experimentĪfter a series of mysterious but devastating system crashes this spring and summer on my HP/Win7 computer with Lightroom 6, I installed Linux, a free operating system I have used and liked in the past but which does not run Lightroom.
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