> and there are multiple, competing (and very competent) Lightroom replacements for digital darkroom work
The problem I have with most of the replacements is that none of them seem to put much/any effort into cataloguing and taxonomy. There's plenty of open source alternatives for the RAW exposure component of Lightroom but I don't think that's the reason people stick with it. Organising photos is hard and Lightroom is fantastic at it.
Interesting. To me, those features are the ones I struggle most with in Lightroom. The workflow per se works great, but that a tool would dictate to me how I organize my pictures (as in: on the file system) is a big nogo. I use LR in a VM (since it doesn't run on Linux) and in such an environment, there's always a shortage of disk space. LR gives me exactly 0 possibilities to work around that - the only option is to create a new DB for each project, which negates all upsides to the system.
> The workflow per se works great, but that a tool would dictate to me how I organize my pictures (as in: on the file system) is a big nogo.
You mean in a file system at all or you mean that it wants things stored in a particular folder structure? If the latter, Lightroom doesn't enforce any particular structure. If the former, I'm not aware of another solution that works with images that aren't on disk. Darktable, RawTherapee, Capture One Pro etc. all work with stuff on a filesystem.
I don't really care about the folder structure, I'd just like to be able to move parts of my library around without losing all the work I've done.
Darktable for example saves its settings in a file alongside the RAW image. Done. I can move those around without being afraid of anything. LR however enforces Adobe's own, opaque solution that I'm not aware of any possibilities to efficiently manage without going through LR itself.
Don't get me wrong, tagging etc. is nice. I'd just rather do it on my own in a system that I can manage myself (e.g. BeFS if need be).
The problem I have with most of the replacements is that none of them seem to put much/any effort into cataloguing and taxonomy. There's plenty of open source alternatives for the RAW exposure component of Lightroom but I don't think that's the reason people stick with it. Organising photos is hard and Lightroom is fantastic at it.