Like many people of my age I have a collection of thousands of photographs. These go back to my first photos from the 1960s and even further with albums of family photos stretching back to the early years of the 20^th century. In the 1970s and 80s the number of pictures I was taking increased dramatically with colour and black & white negatives, mounted slides and of course many prints.

Moving on to 1999 and I was using my first digital camera so again the number of photos increases. At about the same time I bought a film scanner so many of the old negatives and slides were converted to digital. 

And now here I am with tens of thousands of pictures in many different formats wondering whether I can catalogue them in such a way that I can find the ones I want to look at. This was actually the reason why I bought my first Mac computer back in 2007 as it came with iPhoto which seemed to be the perfect solution. Eventually this was changed to the current Photos app, annoyingly just after I had decided to buy Aperture which was discontinued by Apple and which does not run any more.

Apple iCloud Photos is very good and it does give me access to much of my collection. But it was never the best thing for RAW files from my newer cameras or for the TIFF scans of negatives and slides. I wanted something that could look after all of these things or at least could help deal with larger files than a cloud-based solution. Really I wanted to be able to see the actual files rather than have them hidden inside Apple Photos.

Lightroom was one piece of software which seemed to have all the answers. The subscription was a drawback but maybe I could live with it. And Lightroom is very easy to use too. But then they started adding in all the fancy AI features but didn’t change the organisation side of the program very much. 

Then there were other issues. Lightroom runs on Mac or Windows but only on the latest versions (or two older versions). Yes, I could run an older edition on outdated operating systems but then it seemed a waste to pay the full subscription price with no new features. But worse still is the amount of computer resources it needs. The memory requirement is huge especially when I add up all the additional processes from the required Adobe Creative Cloud app. When thinking about what computers I need I found myself having to look at more expensive ones just to be able to run Adobe software. Altogether I had a love/hate relationship with Lightroom.

After trying to find a way to make Apple Photos work for me I had a brief go at using Acdsee but that never really worked the way I needed. I wanted something which did not lock me in and which ideally could run on Linux if needed since I have old computers which could be used. 

Looking at open source software for managing and processing photo collections has been interesting. I tried Darktable without much success. With practice I am sure I could use it to process photos but as a management tool it is poor, especially as it cannot catalogue video clips. Rawtherapee proved to be a very approachable RAW editor but again not something suited to cataloguing. But Digikam seemed to be just what I need, until I realised that it’s built in editor is somewhat eccentric.

Where does that leave me now? On my desktop Mac today I have many different software apps but the ones I use most are a combination of Digikam for cataloguing and Rawtherapee for editing both RAW files and for inverting negatives. I tried SILYPIX but it was just too slow and Rawtherapee could do just as well. Apple Photos is still in use as my show and share app.