The photographers I’ve known generally use some kind of dedicated application to organize their photos. Lightroom is one of the common ones. Adobe Bridge is another. Shotwell works on Linux.
I think the real problem is that I don’t know any half-decent photo editing programs on Linux. GIMP seems to be the best option, but it’s not even on par with mid-1990s Photoshop.
GIMP needs a name change and a serious injection of money like Blender.
To be honest I don't understand why 'the industry' doesn't want to invest in this. They hated being tethered to things like Maya, I can't imagine they enjoy being tethered to Photoshop.
It's 90% a project coordination problem, I think. Blender's efforts started early with a foundation being created shortly after it made it first open source release. It took from 2002 to 2006 for the first movie project from the foundation, and those projects were necessary as a spearheading effort to clean up the core featureset. It took roughly another decade of those projects and gradual efforts to revise the UX before the public perception switch flipped from "Blender sucks" to "Blender's awesome." At that point it snowballed and the project is now swimming in resources. But there was always a clear point of contact in the middle steps that helped make the best use of the resources that were there.
GIMP doesn't have a foundation to talk to, other than GNOME, which actually makes it harder to engage with because it means you have an institution in the way that fights ICs. GNOME is infamously bad at outreach efforts for its top level applications. What seems to define GNOME, at least in the past decade, is that the thing actually being developed is the libraries, while the existing apps are just being shepherded down the road to keep up. And as long as that's the case, the apps will be undermaintained because the foundation will gravitate towards a "don't touch that" policy for everything that isn't a library feature. GIMP has changed very little as a result.
Like, just look at the state of GIMP's developer information. It's a dumpsite. Nobody is in a marketing role or cleaning up documentation. There is development activity, but the bulk of communication about it comes from third party sources who aren't touching the code.
I'm not even a photographer, I'd just like to be able to find a photo organising app on Linux that can do facial recognition as well as Picasa could 12+ years ago. It's sad.
No, it's not that, it's that they don't use the file manager. Linux has DigiKam and DarkTable as native options. Once you have lots of photos you don't really use the file manager as they can't filter on other metadata like GPS, focal length, stars/ratings, etc.
Photographers don't tend to use regular file managers, either. I mean, previews are good and all and there are definitely problems here, but the photographers I know use tools like Adobe Bridge for a multitude of reasons.
Photographers don't use Linux.