Well, that story woke you up!
My comments about Adobe possibly missing a step with Lightroom provoked quite a few of you to send me an email. Indeed, more so than any other article this year, and by a fair margin. As such, it’s worth dipping into your comments and questions and doing a follow up.
It seems a lot of you agreed with my basic contention that Adobe isn’t exactly innovating with Lightroom any more (though they do keep adding features to it, but usually after they do it for Photoshop/ACR). For instance, the following was a fairly common reaction I received:
“I’m a serious enthusiast with a library of nearly 80k images from the past 15+ years and maintaining that library is a huge priority for me. I'm still burned many years later from Apple abruptly ending Aperture. I switched to Lightroom Classic mostly because I thought it was least likely to have an Aperture-style ending. My plan has been to basically accept the "catalog lock in" you describe even as its obvious Lightroom Classic is not Adobe's focus or preferred path forward.”
A lot of you got to Lightroom as an escape from Apple’s abandonment of Aperture (bad move, Apple). You weren’t locked into Aperture’s catalog as it turned out, as several ways to migrate to Adobe quickly appeared, and that’s how many of you got to Lightroom Classic in the first place; it was the best alternative to what you were doing when what you were doing went away.
“I started to think that Adobe was finally putting some work into Lightroom Classic as the newer updates have been appreciated. The AI masking in particular and the duplicate tools and culling is appreciated (I haven't tried them yet, so maybe they suck). But my biggest problem now is how to get rid of all the crap photos I have that the iPhones in my household take and that cameras with insane burst rates leave you with. Seems like your point is that Classic is getting these last and almost begrudgingly, but its also true that editing photos today in Classic gives me better results in much less time than when we were in Africa 10 years ago. Maybe there are other tools that are better but as a hobbyist I don't have time to try them all. Recently I have been using Excire in conjunction with Lightroom. The AI search is excellent. With over 300k photos in my catalog I can just say "show me pictures of Louie riding his red jeep" and get what I am looking for. And I can do it without uploading my collection to some cloud.“
This exposes one of the reasons why I haven’t yet stopped recommending Lightroom Classic, but also why I am pondering whether I should. Yes, Adobe is still updating the program, and we sometimes get new useful features, but as you point out with Excire, we now have a number of products that apply AI against a set of images better than Adobe does at the cataloging level. It was the catalog that was Lightroom’s big win for photo enthusiasts and pros, but now it is lagging what is possible, and by quite some margin, I’d suggest. The question is becoming “if you want to catalog and search your images, is there a better starting place?” Raw converters and photo editors can be called by any catalog program, after all, so if your primary workflow sits inside the catalog, then Lightroom has fallen far behind.
“A lot of what keeps me on Lightroom Classic and Photoshop, and I suspect a lot of others, is that the other tools aren’t substantially better. Enough so to make it worth the effort of relearning a whole new system, building a new workflow, and tools that may or may not work with whatever I would move to.”
I’d agree with that assessment, with an exception, thus my original article. Note my Excire comments, above. The one tool that has gotten substantial better with other software is non-filter, non-structure finding of images in a “catalog.” Adobe’s features beyond that are minimal and nascent, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve seen clearly better from multiple products now.
“I continue using Lightroom Classic. I've used Lightroom and nothing else since 2011. It's what I know, it's where my catalogs are, and my needs are comparatively minimal. Having said that, I think it runs much more slowly now as compared to five years ago. I don't use any of the cloud-based aspects of Adobe; everything is local for me. I get the sense that there's nothing I can do to make it run faster. I know all the basic methods and it runs the same either way.”
Comments like this one were very common among the responses: (a) used Lightroom Classic for a long time; (b) don’t want to use cloud; and (c) seems to run slower now.
Running slower isn’t something I can specifically help with at the moment. I don’t use Lightroom’s cataloging except for a few small tasks (workshops, finished JPEG gallery). Nothing I do would tend to slow down Lightroom because I’m only dealing with a small number of files, and many of those are small themselves. But slowness does seem like a common complaint, so it’s perhaps something I should look into for my reader base.
“It’s also plug-in lock.”
Those that use services and push files from Lightroom said this, and perhaps that’s true. However, the number of people locked this way is far lower than the number who believe they’re locked into Lightroom’s Catalog.
“For context, my history starts with the Lightroom betas, even before 1.0. Over the years Lightroom got better in some ways, and worse in others. Eventually I felt the ‘bad’ outweighed the ‘good’ and ditched it for Capture One, followed by DxO PhotoLab. But now I’m back on Lightroom. Why? It isn’t that Lightroom has magically improved. It is because Lightroom is the only software (of the major commercial photo editors) that supports HDR editing in the Develop module. Capture One doesn’t have it, nor does DxO. By “HDR” I don’t mean the fake tone mapping or combining over- and under-exposed photos that has been around for decades.
I edit photos mainly for visual use, not print, so HDR has real benefit. Granted, this is a rather niche use case, as one needs an HDR-capable monitor to appreciate it (such as the Apple Pro Display HDR or the current Studio Display XDR or one of the M-series MacBook Pros with mini-LED screens). But such displays are becoming more common, and not just from Apple. So as much as I would prefer to use some alternative to Lightroom, it has one “superpower” over the others: native HDR editing.”
An interesting perspective, for sure. I’m sure Greg Benz would agree with you. The only problem here is that still photography continues to lag in terms of display. HDR is standardized and ubiquitous in the video world, from capture to display. The problem still photography has is that HDR hasn’t yet really been standardized from capture to display. Yet. At the point that happens—I hope it happens—I’m pretty sure every surviving photo software tool will rush to add HDR. And then we’ll be right back to discussing the Catalog Lock-In problem.
“I don’t feel that Lightroom Classic is being enshitified more so than any other old large program (Excel and Word being the poster children).”
Don’t get me started on Microsoft. Talk about failures, Word data files are still 32-bit restrained. What engineer in Redmond never made it to the 21st century?
I’m fully with Doctorow on this one: companies that want to still have customers should stop dumping on them. I believe it’s way more than possible to both do your customer a service as well as make a reasonable or better profit. The reason that isn’t always happening has to do with greed at the top. The incentives for top management now have nothing to do with product or customers.
Over my career I’ve watched a lot of companies forget that customers buy products. If you’re going to take people to the outhouse, you should not expect them to come back. And when they don’t, your business suddenly doesn’t look so good, and you’ll end up starting one form of death spiral unless someone at the top gets wise. And to that last bit:
“For what it's worth, and not public knowledge per se, we happen to have a friend who is high up at Adobe. The company knows it has a problem and people are on board trying to turn the ship.”
Okay, great. But battleships are difficult to turn. There was a time when Lightroom was more a versatile destroyer and much nimbler. It will be interesting to see what Adobe does with the Topaz Labs acquisition. I’d hope that they’d add Topaz-derived sharpening to Photoshop and Lightroom, as the sharpening capabilities of both programs are long-in-the-tooth.
“Is there a best practice or methodology for being more catalog agnostic?”
Simple answer: make sure that your data files are organized in a well-considered and well-named folder structure, and that your images are well-named, as well. Do not allow any product, including Lightroom Classic to just place and name things automatically or even semi-automatically. Even if you’re using a cataloging product, the minute you acquiesce to just letting it do what it wants, you lose control, and when you lose control, your options without that catalog product become quite problematic and limited. Your images should all be in a master folder, separated into some sub-folder system within that folder (year, place, event, subject, etc.), and every folder and every photo needs to have a name that’s searchable. DSC_0001 is not searchable. That master images folder needs to be backed up, both onsite and offsite, if you wish to truly make sure your images are always recoverable.
One problem here is that “edits” for files can live either in the file or outside the file in a sidecar .XMP file. This is one of the “lock-in” aspects of Lightroom Classic that keeps people in that system. Any transition to another product has to deal with this, and it’s not pretty.
I used to have a couple specific articles about this, but I’m currently in the process of completely rewriting the Learn section of bythom, and this question is on my to-do list to answer more fully, so stand by.
“Isn’t almost all the metadata added to my images—by myself religiously (I wish!) with Bridge, or by my camera and RAW processor(s)—pretty much standardized, in some cases by Adobe themselves, and indexed by macOS and Windows file systems? I thought that if I wasn’t too lazy and would try and master Spotlight on my Mac I could search and filter my images via the macOS file system. Combined with a personal naming system, that largely eliminated my desire for a vendor specific catalog (Lightroom).”
Uh, maybe? That certainly is the expectation. The devil is in the details, though. The .XMP extension stands for Extendable Metadata Platform. It’s now an ISO standard (16684-1:2012). However, the standard is simply a standard for putting things into metadata, not specific required metadata. This is where the issues begin, and the big question becomes does the software you’re currently using understand the things that were put in the .XMP file?
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Moreover, there’s also the case of converting a file to a different format, as .XMP data goes in different places with different types of files when it gets internalized. So, if you save a file to PNG, .XMP data needs to go into a specific spot: an iTXt block with the XML:com.adobe.xmp keyword. Yeah, getting kinda techie here. Some programs do the right thing, some don’t.
As to your specific Spotlight question I had to resort to some deep AI research to get a somewhat reliable answer, and that explains my “maybe” response. Moreover, Spotlight is scheduled to change in macOS Golden Gate, so the answer may change. Specifically, Spotlight looks within files, but cannot associate files. It will find keywords, description, authors, copyright, in your image files for instance. If your metadata is in a sidecar file (xxxxxxxx.XMP), yes Spotlight will find text in the metadata, however, it can’t associate that with the actual image file.
As a side benefit, my AI also provided a way to sync keywords to finder tags for NEF files, so if you’re geeky and trust your AI, you might try that.
“To further enforce your theory that Adobe may have missed a turn or two, look at their stock price over the last year or two. Investors seem to be aware also that the company is faltering.”
From an investor’s point of view the issue has been growth: where does additional revenue and profit come from? Adobe’s in a tricky place, as for the most part they have gobbled up all the folk that can afford their product. But they can’t really raise prices easily, as that would likely trigger defections. The best way for Adobe to grow is via additional products, and you see them trying to do that with Firefly and now the Topaz acquisition. Perhaps at the corporate level Adobe has some growth room (pricing and products), but for the individual user I think they’ve hit the ceiling for now. But that makes it even more important to keep those individuals tithing, and lack of updates that add things those users want fixed or added can result in a slow leak on the subscription side.
“I started using Nitro Photos since I can use the finder/file system and have the same organization I’ve used since 2009 with Lightroom Classic.”
Nitro Photo is the work of the original manager of the Apple Aperture project (as is Raw Power). It is somewhat akin to the way Aperture worked many moons ago. For macOS users, it’s definitely a possibility. On the Windows side, ACDSee is probably a product some should look at (though the developing module isn’t as refined as Adobe’s).
“On the comparisons of noise reduction and sharpening tools: does Dx0 do a better job than Lightroom Classic?”
Uh, maybe? We have lots of different noise and sharpening tools these days. Can I make an argument for one over another? Yes, though this constantly changes with updates. I’d make the same argument with NR as I do with monitor profiles: using any tool gets you 90%+ of the way to what you can do, and you probably can’t really see or justify the other 10%-. Adobe, DxO, onOne, et.al., now all have reasonable NR tools that use AI. My contention would be: pick one and use it. Don’t deep end into trying to find the “best.”
“Two problems arise for me in the next year. I need to upgrade to Windows 11 (which means a new machine) or change OS to Linux. Noise reduction on Linux is not state of the art, though DaVinci Resolve 21 for stills is a possibility. Plus I’d need a program to ingest raw images and import only the new photos. Any suggestions?”
Probably “bite the bullet” (buy a new machine with Windows 11). I’ll have to admit I’m not a Linux gear head. One of things you have to accept if you’re going to Linux is that it is not a system that commercial software developers target, as the Linux community is mostly Open Source and free advocates. Thus, great new idea and innovative software tends to happen in macOS and Windows environments, plus your choices are broader and deeper on the commercial OS's.
I’m sure that some Linux fans will jump in and tell me all about the great free options that are available, but in my experience, those tend to be geeky, less feature-packed, and slower in performance than the macOS and Windows commercial “equivalents”. I put “equivalents” in quotes because, other than perhaps DaVinci Resolve, there aren’t many actual truly equivalent products on the Linux platform.
The problem with buying a new machine is that you’d now be paying the AI tax (memory and storage costs are rising). Perhaps you can still find machines at the older prices that are acceptable, but those will all be going away soon to be replaced by ones with higher list prices.
“What is your recommended raw catalog and editing software that does not have a subscription payment scheme?”
There really isn’t one. And that’s sort of my point about catalog lock-in: once you’re using catalogs to manage an image collection, you’re stuck in that ecosystem. It’s very difficult to escape.
You’re also not going to like my answer to your question: there isn’t a perfect alternative, thus my current dilemma on whether to recommend Lightroom still. Basically, if you want “really good” software, it has to be profitable for the software developer. The old model of selling updates has long had economic problems, as it means most of a company’s income comes in spurts, and development cycles aren’t as predictable as you think, so a company can go a long period without reasonable income. Subscriptions give a software developmer a known, stable source of cash. My only issue with Adobe’s subscriptions is what happens when you stop paying; most other developers have a better policy on this.
But to fully answer your question: you’d have to give up on catalogs and just go to a fast browser, such as FastRawViewer. That implies that your images aren’t scattered all over the place and are well organized in folders (though AI is changing this). You could then process selected images from the browser with several alternatives, such as Affinity or your company’s free raw converter. Be prepared for slower performance and missing features when you go to the free products.