Take a look at Rawtherapee - I found it much easier to get into than Darktable. It doesn’t really do management of a library of images but you can use Digikam or Shotwell for that and set Rawtherapee as the external RAW editor. If you want to quickly evaluate and rate image files nothing beats Geeqie though in my experience.
Re GIMP: On large files I’ve noticed significant improvements to performance by setting the image encoding to 32bit linear floating point. Gimp uses this behind the scenes for processing anyway, so it doesn’t have to do any extra conversion while you’re editing. Just be aware that you’ll want to be using a linear icc profile too or your images will be dark, and make sure to convert it appropriately before exporting. If you’re using the built-in sRGB profile GIMP should take care of everything for you though.
Also check in your preferences that you are allowing GIMP enough access to your CPU and memory.
GIMP’s defaults are really good imo, but if you deviate from them in one area you need to know how to set the others in accordance with it to get images looking like you expect. It can be complicated to fully understand it all, but if you experiment with 1) the encoding settings 2) your image’s icc profile and 3) the display profile you should be able to settle on a workflow that works for you. It’s all configurable, you just need to find the right combo 👍
Also bear in mind that the file sizes you see reported in GIMP are their size in RAM, as opposed to their size when exported to disk and include all the extra non-destructive stuff GIMP is using while working on your project. Saved XCF projects will be large for this reason too, but when you export as an image file like .tif or .jpg the file size on disk will be as expected. Personally, I like seeing my RAM getting properly utilised as it’s much faster than my disk…
Take a look at Rawtherapee - I found it much easier to get into than Darktable. It doesn’t really do management of a library of images but you can use Digikam or Shotwell for that and set Rawtherapee as the external RAW editor. If you want to quickly evaluate and rate image files nothing beats Geeqie though in my experience.
Re GIMP: On large files I’ve noticed significant improvements to performance by setting the image encoding to 32bit linear floating point. Gimp uses this behind the scenes for processing anyway, so it doesn’t have to do any extra conversion while you’re editing. Just be aware that you’ll want to be using a linear icc profile too or your images will be dark, and make sure to convert it appropriately before exporting. If you’re using the built-in sRGB profile GIMP should take care of everything for you though.
Also check in your preferences that you are allowing GIMP enough access to your CPU and memory.
GIMP’s defaults are really good imo, but if you deviate from them in one area you need to know how to set the others in accordance with it to get images looking like you expect. It can be complicated to fully understand it all, but if you experiment with 1) the encoding settings 2) your image’s icc profile and 3) the display profile you should be able to settle on a workflow that works for you. It’s all configurable, you just need to find the right combo 👍
Also bear in mind that the file sizes you see reported in GIMP are their size in RAM, as opposed to their size when exported to disk and include all the extra non-destructive stuff GIMP is using while working on your project. Saved XCF projects will be large for this reason too, but when you export as an image file like .tif or .jpg the file size on disk will be as expected. Personally, I like seeing my RAM getting properly utilised as it’s much faster than my disk…