Windows photo workflow – migrating from Linux
Over the past decade almost, I have been primarily using Linux of some sort on my systems. So when I took up photography a few years ago I had to find tools on Linux to suit.
I ended up with Rapid-Photo-Downloader for downloading and sorting/ renaming images from SD cards (I can not recommend this program enough!) and then Geeqie for culling the sometimes thousands of images from an event down to a manageable couple of hundred or so. I would then process in darktable, export to jpeg and then upload to fb albums usually, as thats where the audience is for these events unfortunately. This process worked well. I found that darktable processed the raw files from my Lumix G9 a lot nicer than Adobe Lightroom did on Windows anyway, especially with denoising and sharpening.
Then a few months ago I borrowed a Fujifilm X-H1 and XF50-140 from a friend, to use at a car club Street Sprint event. I did my usual import, then processed the files in darktable on Linux, then rebooted into Windows and processed in Lightroom. Lightroom was the winner for these files, for ease of massaging the raws to what I want and speed at which I could do so – which matters when you have a hundred or so images to go through. The #Fujifilm was also much sharper out of the box. So I sold all my #Lumix kit (G9 and 3 lenses) and sourced a second hand X-H1 (because of the body style with grip), and a new XF50-140 f2.8. Also a Fujifilm filter to protect the front element, at the recommendation of Auckland Camera Centre who mentioned a Fujifilm customer of theirs swears by them. No complaints from me so far, though it is a $160 filter after all and you'd expect Fujifilm would know what works well on their lenses.
I then realised that importing using Linux and rebooting into Windows to process, accessing files on a drive shared between OS, was going to get really annoying. I wanted to use Lightroom for processing due to the results I could get at speed, so went on the hunt for an importing and culling software for Windows. [Photo Mechanic](https://home.camerabits.com/tour-photo-mechanic/) was the one recommendation that always popped up, so I did a trial – and I do not like it. I found it not overly fast compared to Geeqie for culling, and occasionally would crash while skipping through the images marking for culling. I have actually got Geeqie running under WSL before, but didn’t consider that a long term solution so kept looking. Eventually I discovered XnView, and installed [XnView MP](https://www.xnview.com/en/xnviewmp/) and this solved my importing and culling needs just like that! It even allows basic processing of RAW files embeded jpegs and exporting; which I find easier on drive space than saving both raws and jpegs.
Now, anyone shooting Fujifilm is probably aware there is a free Capture One version just for this brand. I tried it, and it works brilliantly, however Lightroom is just faster to get to the result I want from my images. At least at this stage – unless I spend some time working out a faster workflow/preset for Capture One. I might.
#photography #windows #lightroom #darktable #XnView #XnViewMP #photomechanic
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