This is fine and all, but Darktable offers no 'ease of use' when actually operating on those nicely organised images.
You can do exactly what you just said with PhotoMechanic, or Rapid Photo Downloader, and still open lightroom and navigate the file structure.
Trying that with Darktable is a pain. It wants you to import and the file sytem browser is poor.
Plus, are you going to edit all the photos you've downloaded? Are you not going to rate, discard, reorganise the keepers, tags and sort etc etc? Darktable is leagues behind lightroom in this capability, not to mention noise handling, camera specific tone curves and speed of use.
It is a powerful editor, but its setup for hobbyists and tinkerers who go from file to file and repeat every single step manually. The batch processing is convoluted and at my last try pretty inflexible.for example.
Yeah as I mentioned in my original comment I use "rawtherapee" instead. Which doesn't try to take ownership of any directories, import, etc. It just lets you work with the existing structure.
I don't necessarily edit every picture, but I want to look at white-balance, and similar things, for every shot in a specific session. (Most of the time I can replicate settings from one image to the next - when I'm using studio-strobes the lighting doesn't change.)
The only images I outright delete are those where a model blinks mid-shot, or a strobe fails to fire. In an hour-session I might have 750 images, and I'll likely rank/rate all of them, but only export 20% to JPG, and then those will be pruned as I decide which are the good ones.
You can do exactly what you just said with PhotoMechanic, or Rapid Photo Downloader, and still open lightroom and navigate the file structure.
Trying that with Darktable is a pain. It wants you to import and the file sytem browser is poor.
Plus, are you going to edit all the photos you've downloaded? Are you not going to rate, discard, reorganise the keepers, tags and sort etc etc? Darktable is leagues behind lightroom in this capability, not to mention noise handling, camera specific tone curves and speed of use.
It is a powerful editor, but its setup for hobbyists and tinkerers who go from file to file and repeat every single step manually. The batch processing is convoluted and at my last try pretty inflexible.for example.
I want to love it and use it. But its limited.