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Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. I absolutely hate the SaaS model, the incentives are never in your favor as a customer. In case anyone is looking to ditc

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. I absolutely hate the SaaS model, the incentives are never in your favor as a customer. In case anyone is looking to ditch Lightroom I can't recommend the FOSS alternative RawTherapee strongly enough. It's got a number of features I now find indispensable. I particularly find it easy to use to get that nice rounded off highlight quality film has using RT. I made the swap years ago and have never missed LR.

alkonaut 6y ago
Does it have a good catalog module? I use LR 99% for organization and only do basic touch up. My requirements for a replacement would be an excellent import/export/organizer and a decent raw converter.
- diarrhea 6y ago
  A popular path is to ditch Lightroom for the trio of Rapid Photo Downloader, digikam and finally RawTherapee. This was entirely unusable for me. RawTherepee is only for RAW treatment/export. Digikam can only do photo organization. Now here's the kicker: the two won't talk. Metadata known and written by one is invisible to the other. Using Manjaro, Rapid Photo Downloader eventually started segfaulting on me. I also tried Darktable which looked much better and much more like a Lightroom replacement, but didn't like it. So back to Lightroom, and even Windows as a whole, it is for me.
  - dflynch 6y ago
    Sorry that you saw segfaults when running Rapid Photo Downloader under Manjaro. I am the developer of Rapid Photo Downloader. One thing to keep in mind is that Manjaro, similar to Fedora, is bleeding edge. Things break sometimes when running Manjaro or Fedora. That's the nature of a cutting edge distro. The good news is that things that break are often quickly fixed.
- errantspark 6y ago
  It depends on your workflow I suppose. It has a catalog module that lets you tag images with a color, a star rating and inspect the image easily at 1:1. That's basically all I care about so I have no problems with it. I generally only keep the most recent 100 GB of photos or so locally and I have a decent organization system using folders so I don't lean on it too heavily.
jacobolus 6y ago
Broken software here is the "prize" for the people who opted out of "the SaaS model".
- errantspark 6y ago
  Fair enough, I was more thinking at the time I wrote the comment that people's collective decision to enable these business models was the "playing stupid games" aspect. I could have been less grumpy and more clear about it.
tonyedgecombe 6y ago
the incentives are never in your favor as a customer. They weren't really in your favor with the old model either. Adobe used to pile on new features without thought in an attempt to sell upgrades every other year. In the mean time bugs would continue to exist from one release to the next.

alkonaut 6y ago

Does it have a good catalog module? I use LR 99% for organization and only do basic touch up. My requirements for a replacement would be an excellent import/export/organizer and a decent raw converter.

diarrhea 6y ago
A popular path is to ditch Lightroom for the trio of Rapid Photo Downloader, digikam and finally RawTherapee. This was entirely unusable for me. RawTherepee is only for RAW treatment/export. Digikam can only do photo organization. Now here's the kicker: the two won't talk. Metadata known and written by one is invisible to the other. Using Manjaro, Rapid Photo Downloader eventually started segfaulting on me. I also tried Darktable which looked much better and much more like a Lightroom replacement, but didn't like it. So back to Lightroom, and even Windows as a whole, it is for me.
- dflynch 6y ago
  Sorry that you saw segfaults when running Rapid Photo Downloader under Manjaro. I am the developer of Rapid Photo Downloader. One thing to keep in mind is that Manjaro, similar to Fedora, is bleeding edge. Things break sometimes when running Manjaro or Fedora. That's the nature of a cutting edge distro. The good news is that things that break are often quickly fixed.
errantspark 6y ago
It depends on your workflow I suppose. It has a catalog module that lets you tag images with a color, a star rating and inspect the image easily at 1:1. That's basically all I care about so I have no problems with it. I generally only keep the most recent 100 GB of photos or so locally and I have a decent organization system using folders so I don't lean on it too heavily.

jacobolus 6y ago

Broken software here is the "prize" for the people who opted out of "the SaaS model".

errantspark 6y ago
Fair enough, I was more thinking at the time I wrote the comment that people's collective decision to enable these business models was the "playing stupid games" aspect. I could have been less grumpy and more clear about it.

tonyedgecombe 6y ago

the incentives are never in your favor as a customer. They weren't really in your favor with the old model either. Adobe used to pile on new features without thought in an attempt to sell upgrades every other year. In the mean time bugs would continue to exist from one release to the next.