Are you trying to edit RAW photos on your Chromebook? It’s actually easier than you think. While Adobe’s Lightroom app requires a paid subscription to edit RAW photos, Darktable is free and easy to install since modern Chromebooks easily run Linux apps.
Enable Linux
The best way to edit RAW photos on Chromebook actually requires Linux. It’s pretty simple and straightforward toenable Linux on your Chromebook. This is because there’s no native, offline-compatible RAW photo editors available on Chrome OS, so you’ll have to install a photo editor designed for Linux instead.
Simply go to Settings > About ChromeOS, then click “Set Up” next to the Linux development environment.
This will walk you through the process of configuring your Linux environment, including allocating storage to Linux (which can share storage with your ChromeOS environment for file storage).
If you plan to have a large image database withDarktable, I’d recommend expanding the standard 10GB of space to something closer to 20GB or 30GB to have room for the database to grow.
Install Darktable
While the mobileAdobe Lightroom appdoeswork to edit RAW photos on your Chromebook, it requires a paid subscription to Adobe’s Creative Cloud to do so. Without a subscription, you’re limited to just editing non-RAW photos.
Also, there are quirks to editing offline using Lightroom on Chromebooks. The app has been known to sign users out of their account when offline, and sometimes it’ll launch the Play Store when you’re offline—especially if it can’t verify your subscription status.
Because Lightroom CC is so finicky for offline editing, I recommend diving into a different app to edit your RAW photos on your Chromebook: Darktable.
Darktableis anopen source RAW photo editoravailable on all major desktop platforms—Linux included. If you’ve never heard of Darktable, that’s okay. It’s essentially an open-source alternative to the traditionalAdobe Lightroom Classicapp that runs on macOS and Windows.
To install Darktable on your Chromebook, you’ll want to use Flathub.Setting up Flathubis pretty simple, and once you have it ready to go, simply run the commandflatpak install flathub org.darktable.Darktablein the Linux Terminal.
This will install Darktable through Linux on your Chromebook. You’ll be able to find the installed app through the Launcher and even pin it to your task bar.
Share Your Photos Folder With Darktable
Once you have Darktable installed, go to your Files app, find the folder that has your RAW photos (whether that’s on your SSD or an external drive), and share it with Linux.
To do this, simply right-click on the folder and then hit “Share with Linux.” Typically, I just share my entire drive with Linux so that way I can always access the files on my Chromebook when using a Linux app.
Darktable Brings Full RAW Photo Editing to Your Chromebook
Darktable definitely has a learning curve to it—I’ve been editing RAW photos in Lightroom Classic for well over a decade, and it’s a bit cumbersome for me to use personally. However, Darktable is an immensely powerful photo editor, and it definitely rivals Lightroom Classic in its feature set.
There’s just about any editing tool you’d want to use in Darktable. There’s even a collection system similar to Lightroom.
All the editing that you do in Darktable is also non-destructive, happening in sidecar files that live next to each photo you edit. This means that you’ll never destroy the original image and all edits can be undone in Darktable, while the original RAW photos could even be moved to other software in the future should you want to do that.
Darktable truly converts your Chromebook into a mobile editing workstation. Something to keep in mind, however, is that Darktable might not rungreaton all Chromebooks. The Chromebook Plus line requires devices to have at least an i3 processor and 8GB of RAM, but even that might not be optimal depending on the type of photos you’re editing.
I used Darktable to edit some uncompressed RAW photos from my Sony A7iii, and it worked well. There was a little lag, but overall it was a decent experience. However, if I was shooting with a higher-megapixel camera like the A7Riv or even a Leica, then the Chromebook would likely lag a bit more.
Overall, though, I was very happy with the experience that Darktable on my Chromebook offered me. In the instance that my Chromebook is the only system I have with me while out on a shoot, I can now confidently edit my pictures, which is pretty amazing.
Darktable is just one of manyLinux apps that work great on your Chromebook. I’ve used Linux to install Obsidian, GIMP, Discord, and even LibreOffice in the past. The addition of Linux a few years ago to ChromeOS really made Google’s budget-friendly laptops so much more powerful.
