For the photography work(food/travel) I do, 99.9% of it is handled in Capture One Pro. That manages my photo catalogs, and non destructive edits. All of your photos are organized right on the file system Photos\Food\Restaurant, however you want to do it. Imports can be synced from existing directories, or copied from memory to those respective directories. Rarely, if ever do I need to jump out to a more advanced editor. Regarding rating systems, I use simply five stars for my shots that are publish worthy / and use various color codes to indicate where I've published them to already.

If anyone else was also wondering, prices starting at $299 (or $20/month.

>But I am not sure how this all fits with things like Lightroom/darktable. I know Pixelmator can easily edit RAW files. But darktable seems to be able to edit a batch of images at once so you don't have to manually edit each one. But should you?

If they are similar enough (e.g. same color correction for shots during the same hour), or you have common needs (e.g. add the same watermark) then yes, it can save you time.

>Plus there is something about organizing photos with Lightroom/darktable flows that I don't quite get. I have gotten by with manually organizing my files for a decade. Do I really need a star rating system?

Perhaps, perhaps not. They add a lot beyond a "star rating system". Depends on how many pictures and how professionally you shoot. Sorting 2,000 photos shot on a newspaper, travel etc assignment, and picking winners, is no fun done manually.

>* Also darktable boasts the ability to export an image into GIMP. Is that really like a big feature that you can't do from elsewhere?*

It's basically irrelevant, unless you run Linux, or are one of the few that runs both programs (Darktable/GIMP) on a Mac or Windows machine.

>Isn't it just a Save then Open type situation?

Do it 30 times for 30 pictures and it gets old fast. Especially since you need to scout to where you've saved each time.

"But darktable seems to be able to edit a batch of images at once so you don't have to manually edit each one. But should you?" => It can be useful for pictures taken in a similar context. Like you might want to set the temperature if they were taken at the same moment and you want the same atmosphere. But you don't to have the sames values for all parameters for all your pictures.

"Do I really need a star rating system?" => Not really in most use-cases, the flags are enough (rejected and accepted).

How do you organize things like "those are from this shoot on location" and "these are from the studio shoot?" Do you do that using the filesystem, or only inside darktable?

macOS tags work great for these things, especially when a single item belongs in more than one folder.

These days I use folders primarily for organizing tasks that must be tied to the filesystem, such as making backups, and for representing entire projects or super-categories. For anything more nuanced I just apply some of my 100+ or so tags.

e.g., if you collect “reaction” images, most images may show more than one emotion (angry, happy, sad, etc.), so you just lump them in one folder and tag each image with the relevant elements. Same for people and characters that may appear in more than one series, and images that will have more than one character, so instead of folders named after a series or character, you just have a “Movies” or “Anime” etc. folder and tag each image with the series’ name and the characters in it.

I use folders. I think most people do.

I own Pixelmator but I find the UI to not be great.

If I really need to get something done, I use Acorn (https://flyingmeat.com), which I like a lot. The support and documentation is top-notch.