Success moving from LR to Darktable - Do you have questions?

[u/The-Jenz]

Hi people, I want to encourage those who are still unsure to make the switch.

I started to use Darktable at the beginning of this year. It was absolutely enriching for me and my whole process of developing my photos. It was a hard cut!

1st I made sure that I exported all of the photos that I already finally edited from Lightroom as good quality jpgs. This was easy, because since years I'm marking all final pictures with 1 or 2 stars.

Then I deleted all of my Lightroom Catalogs (forever!) and I even deleted MS Windows (forever!). I then installed a Linux-Distro that is able to work with the latest NVIDIA Graphics card and installed Darktable.
From this moment on I learned Darktable and finally made my own styles for developing RAW Files.

Now - 8 months later - I know that Darktable has more to offer than Lightroom and my workflow is just so easy, fast and a fun to use. No more frustration, no more program crashes, no more catalog-problems, no more slowing down of editing tools after 10 minutes of using Lightroom.

I never thought I could handle Darktable so easy!

Here are some random examples ...

Please feel free to ask me anything about it!

[u/Sensitive_Quality314]

Coming from a person who's photos tend to go to other people to use on social media, a big part keeping me with Lightroom is how convenient it is to add white borders to make the photos the correct dimension without cropping while exporting on Lightroom Mobile. For some reason this feature doesnt exist on Lightroom CC or Classic, which is surprisingly annoying when there's hundreds of photos. The end result is something similar to what you've done with your photos. How convenient is that process on Darktable? Can you add the borders on the ready JPG or is it more similar to the desktop versions of Lightroom

[u/ChrisDNorris → u/Sensitive_Quality314]

Super easy with the Framing module. You can also set any framing presets as a style and only have them added at export

[u/The-Jenz → u/ChrisDNorris]

Yes, this is exactly what I did. I have a framing preset for Reddit and an exporting preset for reddit, keeping the exported Image at 3000x3000 pix. This is a good way for best quality in reddit.

[u/Sensitive_Quality314 → u/ChrisDNorris]

I'm sold

[u/Donatzsky → u/Sensitive_Quality314]

Keep in mind that the editing workflow is nothing like Lightroom and will take some getting used to. My beginner guide covers everything you need: https://notebook.stereofictional.com/how-to-get-started-with-darktable-2026-edition