Darktable

Darktable has very thorough documentation. Read the documentation. Get familiar with Darktable. It is a very powerful tool.

Think about how you want your photos arranged. Import a small group to start with. Use a small group, say 20 or maybe 100 photos, in Darktable. Try it while you’re reading the documentation.

I usually have my photos organized by camera and date. I’m thinking I should organize them by say, people, indoors, nature, cityscape, etc. If you’re using your photos in websites like I am, you’ll need to move the photos you use, into a directory for each project. You’ll have thousands of pictures, no need to use any of them more than once.

The photo management is going to be the first step. When you’re managing thousands of pictures, you need an efficient systematic way of processing them. Once you get that system figured out, you’ll have to learn the photo editing skills.

Mostly, you’ll make minor changes and then export each photo into a separate directory for all the photos for each project. You can get into the finer details of photo editing using Darktable and Gimp later, after you learn the basics.