We don’t want to pay Adobe anymore, so my Dad is looking for an replacement for Lightroom Classic.
He has over 4500 photos in Lightroom and we want a basically drop in replacement.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
EDIT1: Also, how do we transfer photos out of Lightroom?
EDIT2: All photos are locally stored.
There is hardly any technology that will accompany us for the whole life. I would be more worried about losing decades of digital images simply because of a technology shift, than to be enslaved by Adobe in using their tools for the rest of my life.
BTW, when the sort of money I pay monthly for LR will become an issue, I have about half a dozen similarly priced subscriptions to get rid of first, which are far less useful to me.
Why would you lose decades of digital images? Only if Adobe fix it so you rely on them. All i want from a photography edit program is to bring in photos, edit them, save them into my own folder, done. I don’t want Adobe to make a digital copy that’s saved in their cloud ‘so i can access it on another computer’. Because it just means i can’t access that photo when I’m offline and spending time in my campervan i am often offline. I’d copy the photo, rename it, still couldn’t open it again to edit. It’s nice being to able to go through hundreds of photos sat there unfinished in lightroom but that’s it.
But that’s a shit system designed to trap you into Adobe. I have photo, i open photo in program, i edit photo, i save photo into my desired folder on my computer, that’s it, that’s all i want.
I don’t think £10 a month is value for money at all, at least something like Netflix will put new films and tv up they’ve financed. With Lightroom I’m paying for access, that’s all. I use 1% of it.
Ever tried to open a file that was made with an application only running on a computer that was last made 30+ years ago, or to read a medium for which the last reader was seen in the wild 20 years ago? Digital files are volatile, they can be lost for many reasons (backup is not a “forever” solution in the digital world).
Adobe is the least of my concerns in this regard. Besides, are you aware that many of the most common file formats, often including the ones used by backup applications, are proprietary or were developed by those big companies that are considered as evil? It is funny, isn’t it, that many of the tools that are supposed to bring our digital possessions into the eternity are proprietary? Ever use TIFFs in your image management workflow? PDF in your daily life? Not to mention raw files made by cameras, a format that easily disappears ten years after it was introduced or less?