Mod Cup - Disco Peach Connection

Always had been a coffee lover but didn't really get nutty about if until someone brewed me a cup of this and I realized there was MUCH better coffee out there than what I was getting

I just spent the past 2 weekends migrating from Lightroom CC with just under 1TB of photos, mostly RAWs, making up about 50,000 files. I kind of made it up as I went and I spent a lot of time testing and validating. I'm going to do a writeup here to hepefully help ayone else coming acrross this and/or in case someone has ideas.

My Requirements:

1. Move all photos off Lightroom and preserve both RAW files and snapshot renders at high quality. I intend on staying on Lightroom because it's my editor of choice. I've litigated Darktable in comments on Lemmy, and while I love the software and the concept, I use Lightroom for my semi-professional work
2. (The hard part) Metadata. I absolutely need my album organization, my picks, and my star ratings from Lightroom. More on this below
3. All data must move to my self-hosted Immich with a TrueNAS pool behind it. The stack is Proxmox running a Truenas VM and a Debain VM. The Debian VM runs docker where Immich runs. Connectivity is driven by Netbird mesh VPN. That is a limitation for sharing and I'm ok with it.

Getting your pictures out

• Adobe doesn't make this easy just below the surface. There are open source tools intended to help one migrate from Lighroom Classic catalogs to Immich, but CC is very different. The export options are very particular.
  • Adobe lets you export a massive dump of pictures and renders as a real export option. It's through their website and it will email you when a dump is ready. Said dump will contain multiple zip files each with RAWs and renders. NO Metada or structure is included and NO edit data.
• You can "Archive" from Lightroom CC (tested on Mac) and that will output originals + the edit file AND it will preserve the root album from which your photo came. But no metadata beyond that (no ratings, folder structure, picks). The bad part is that this deletes your files once it's done. You can still restore fromTrash but this is definitely a hostile action against users.
• You can just output EVERYTHING. This is for the truly insane as you sit there and wait for Lightroom to render each one of your pictures individually. If you do original + edits, that returns the same thing as Archive but without structure.
• The secret 4th option: you can (as of this writing) parse Lightroom's internal catalog and get Albums, picks, star ratings, and folder structure. This was a massive unlock for me. This file was at ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/

My solution going forward

Because I was discovering this as I went, I tried some version of all of the options above, but going forward, I have a process which should be much easier.

First, I will parse the catalog which is a SQLite db and extract the newest "version" of each picture and the content I care about. I will store it in a CSV for long-term holding.

Once metadata is stored, I'll go and request the archive through the website. That will take a few hours to possibly days (it took me about 2 hours on a Friday night). Once that's done, you get an email and a link to a personalized site. You have to parse the (for me) 50+ links and download them sequentially. It took me a few hours to download 1 TB limited by my local bandwidth (for which I'm eternally grateful). With my TrueNAS storage, I have the luxury of landing the data and uploading it to Immich separately.

For XMPs, the edit data, you have to get that from a local source so either export originals or the desktop app "Archive All" option.

You'll have to decide what you need and maybe you have fewer requirements than me.

Landing the Pictures

The next challenge is grabbing all of that data, pictures and ratings and applyhing them in Immich. Luckily, it has a fantastic API so I can script the whole thing. Most of the mapping happened by picture name and there were a few times where I had to dig into exif to identify a picture. Overall, i think I had 40 or so files out of 50k+ which couldn't be mapped.

Encountered Problems:

• As mentioned before, this was a try-it-until-it-works situation for me. I had to download all of my pictures 2 times by 2 different methods (I didn't document this but there was an SMB share involved).
• Stars are a new object and I had to manually enable it in Immich
• I couldn't replicated nested album functionality in Immich and chose to keep the root album name + a tag of the folder structure. That worked well for me
• Lightroom tags could not be exported. I don't use them a lot but that could be a blocker for some.

Disclaimer

• Every word in this write up was written by me on my keyboard
• I used a self-hosted local AI to do this work.
• I know enough to be in control even at a technical level, but the time savings on this project with AI really made it possible
• The AI found the catalog and parsed the data out of it. It would not have occurred to me.

Future

• I have all of this work on my personal Forgejo and if there's enough interest, I may post publicly, though this write-up should serve as a starting point for anyone who wants to replicate my process

As was actually rare at the time i was born into a household which had a personal computer. As long as I remember, computers fascinated me. They still do. But that fascination came with an increasingly adverserial relationship with Windows and distrust of Apple. That changed in 2025, my first full year living with Linux as my primary OS and booting no Windows machines. I'm excited about computing again. I am more dedicated to FOSS than ever. Here are some of MY takeaways in listicle format for no reason:

1. Working on Linux is VERY good. Office suites are great. I'm partial to OpenOnly Office. Developing is a joy because everything feels like its made to work with a few commands. This is in strong contrast to whatever Office/"Copilot" is and my experience developing on Windows.

2. I work in an IT-ish field and I've become a lot more knowledgeable about sysadmin and netadmin type stuff. Not an expert but enough to have more confidence when something does comes up. A lot of this comes from being in terminal more. I understand Windows is going in that direction too, but it won't push users there. Some is from self-hosting.

3. Multimedia is a mixed bag. Krita, Blender, and Godot are incredible tools but if you are a professional who relies on software for your job, some of the FOSS alternatives don't fit a majority of users. I personally don't think Darktable is reliable enough to replace Lightroom because I've had too many crashes on too many machines with it. Despite that, I'm still looking to get rid of Adobe.

4. gaming on Linux is "good" to "great", but not perfect. In some cases, Proton beats Windows, yes. In most cases, games just work on Steam. I think for the amount of tinkering I put in, I could run a barebones W11for gaming and get better overall performance than my CachyOS. I don't because I can live with less than perfect and kernel level anti cheat can pound sand.

5. I dodge an unknown but substantial amount of anguish from not having ads, ai, and surprise updates forced on me. I am sensitive to ads and am upset every time I see one. I'm always shocked to see them on other people's computers. My work computers (Mac) have forced updates and forced restarts which are jarring. My computers feel like my own.

6. I find and (hopefully) fix all kinds of problems. My discord muted itself randomly because of a Wayland bug a few times. There's an open issue about dxvk getting framerate drops after about an hour of gameplay. That one sucks. One of my door sensors stopped working with homeassistant despite it being prefect in mqtt2z; it's a confirmed bug as of 3 weeks ago. This stuff is annoying but I take it as the cost of not trusting black boxes with my hardware.

To wrap it up, I think Linux is better than ever, more accessible than ever, and probably better than Windows for most people. To me, I would recommend it to my mom who only uses basic office tools and a browser and have recommended it to my tech savvy friend who got tired of windows update ruining his super custo1. m W11 setup... but would obviously caution my DOTA-addicted DM or my dad who runs part of his business on Access ( cringe, I know). It feels human, empowering and is good because of the way it is today not just because of its ideals.

I hope this made you reflect on your Linux experience and maybe on how you can contribute to or help the community.

Edit: OnlyOffice, not OpenOffice Edit2: WHY did I post on memes?!? Someone take away my late night/early morning posting privileges

Z8 50mm 1/250 sec at f/8.0, ISO 2000

Something I love about the plazas for some of the older buildings in New York is this extra decoration. A sculpture, or some seating, a few trees, etc. Gives the city some character and allows some space for a food vendor.

Z8 75mm 1/12800 sec at f/4.0, ISO 2500

This is literally the first thing I saw after walking out of the subway station when I visited Manhattan for the first time: a sysadmin convention! Jk, it furry meetup I think.

Which brings me to my takeaway... that New York is a true habitat made for modern humans. It feels more people centric and people act like others exist - at least more so than my experiences in the suburbs or small towns. Must be something about proximity or lack of car-induced separation. Or I've watched too many Not Just Bikes videos.

I didn't know what the protocol was. Can you go up and ask for photos? Is that weird?

Z8 24mm 1/1000 sec at f/16.0, ISO 200

I promise I was safe while taking this picture

The 30 Rock intro theme was on repeat in my head.

Z8 24mm 1/800 sec at f/11.0, ISO 2000

Z8 50mm 1/500 sec at f/11.0, ISO 2000

1/1000 sec at f/8.0, ISO 2000 120 mm Z8

New York

I loved New York but I didnt enjoy Times Square. It's an overly commercialized tourist trap. It felt loud, crowded, and soulless. It reminded me of Las Vegas. (Sorry). This picture somewhat captures my anxiety and discomfort there.

Nikon Z8 120mm 1/1250 sec @ f/9.0 iso 2000

I'm kicking off a few posts from around the city with this very flat shot from floor 102 the One World Observatory.

Z8 75mm f/10 1/1000 sec at ISO 2000

TLDR; tell me if this is a waste of time before I spend forever tinkering on something that will always be janky

I want to run multiple OSs on one machine including Linux, Windows, and maybe OSX from a host with multiple GPUs + igpu. I know there are multiple solutions but I'm looking for advice, opinions and experience. I know I can google how-to but is this worh pursuing?

I currently dual boot Bazzite and Ubuntu, for gaming and develoent respectively. I love Bazzite ease of updates and Ubuntu is where it's at for testing and building frontier AI/ML tools.

What if I kept my computer running a thin hypervisor 24/7 and switched VMs based on my working context? I could pass through hardware as needed.

Proxmox? XCP-NG? Debian + QEMU? Anyone living with these as their computing machines (not homelabs/server hosts)?

This is inspired by Chris Tidus's (YouTube) setup on arch but 1) i don't know arch 2) I have a fairly beefy i7 265k 192gb build, but he's on an enterprise xenon ddr5 build so in a differenrent power class 3) I have a heterogenous mix of graphics cards I'm hoping to pass though depending on workload

Use cases:

• Bazzite + 1 gpu for gaming
• Ubuntu + 1 or more GPUs for work
• Windows + 0 or more GPU Music Production paid vstis and kernel-level anti cheat games (GTAV, etc)
• OSX? Lightroom? GPU?

Edit: Thank you all for your thoughts and contributions

Edit: what I've learned

• this is viable but might be a pain
• a Windows VM for getting around anti-cheat in vames defeats the purpose. I'd need a dual boot for that use case
• hyperV is a no. Qubes Qemu libvirt, yes
• may want to just put everything on sparate disks and boot / VM into them as needed

Edit: distrobox/docker works great but doesn't fit all my needs because I can't install kernel-level modules in them (AFAIK)

I've been following the work that went into this video for a couple of months and have grown to love Level1Techs.

Check out their forum and especially Ubergarm

Somewhere in Toronto. I just stumbled across this and thought it would be a cool shot.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/30081001

120mm f/4.0 1/2000 sec iso1600 Very cropped

Sighted a few dags ago near Vancouver, BC

120mm f/4.0 1/2000 sec iso1600 Very cropped

Just found this in a box and according to some Googling, its TPD is 6.8w!!! Got Debian on there with LXDE but I don't need another laptop. The big drawback is that it has a 32bit processor. It has a 100mbit network port, USB2.0, 2gb RAM and WiFi which isn't working but is listed in ip -a

I've used it to add wireless capabilities to my ancient Brother laser printer but it was extremely slow ( 15 mins before a text page started printing, PER PAGE)