Hints and tips for moving off Lightroom

sirch

sirch

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Anyone got any experience and hints/tips for abandoning Lightroom? I got a good 2 year deal but that's coming to an end and I'm not planning on renewing, I'll probably use DarkTable.

I'm NOT looking for recommendations about alternative applications, I AM looking for actions to take to preserve tags etc. and anything that anyone with experience of doing this wishes they had done before the subscription ended.
 
sirch said:
Anyone got any experience and hints/tips for abandoning Lightroom? I got a good 2 year deal but that's coming to an end and I'm not planning on renewing, I'll probably use DarkTable.

I'm NOT looking for recommendations about alternative applications, I AM looking for actions to take to preserve tags etc. and anything that anyone with experience of doing this wishes they had done before the subscription ended.
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A key thing is to make sure you have exported the metadata, stored in the LR catalogue, into XMP sidecar files. LR doesn't do this by default (but you can make it a default, which you may well have done.

If you haven't there is a way (which I would need to look up) of manually writing a sidecar file for every file in your catalogue.

Darkroom will then read all your existing metadata currently stored in LR (not the processing settings of course).

The catalogue does, however, continue to work even after you cancel your sub, so this might not be as important as I think it is.
 
Very interesting but I still cannot see what he is fussing about as I pay Adobe £120 p.a. which is more or less what I have been paying for many years. In fact even before the subscription model, I was paying over £100 p.a. to buy new versions or upgrades. It costs a lot of money to develop and maintain complex software so free is not feasible. Why do so many photographers complain about paying for software but readily spend thousand of pounds on cameras and lenses? I think the Adobe package is excellent and good value.

Dave
 
Dave Canon said:
Very interesting but I still cannot see what he is fussing about as I pay Adobe £120 p.a. which is more or less what I have been paying for many years. In fact even before the subscription model, I was paying over £100 p.a. to buy new versions or upgrades. It costs a lot of money to develop and maintain complex software so free is not feasible. Why do so many photographers complain about paying for software but readily spend thousand of pounds on cameras and lenses? I think the Adobe package is excellent and good value.

Dave
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There's a right price for everything, and while some will always want the latest, many are happy to use the same kit for a long time. I've been using my A7III since 2018, and I would be completely happy with Lightroom from that year if I'd had the option. Unfortunately in order to get camera compatibility I had to become a subscriber.
 
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I agree with David that the key thing is to always export you metadata (setting in catalog preferences) and tomake sure you have a backup of your images held safely away from disasters.
The edit metadata is of course lost if you dont use Adobe products.
 
Dave Canon said:
Very interesting but I still cannot see what he is fussing about as I pay Adobe £120 p.a. which is more or less what I have been paying for many years. In fact even before the subscription model, I was paying over £100 p.a. to buy new versions or upgrades. It costs a lot of money to develop and maintain complex software so free is not feasible. Why do so many photographers complain about paying for software but readily spend thousand of pounds on cameras and lenses? I think the Adobe package is excellent and good value.

Dave
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It is like saying all politicians are the same. It depends on your perspective and perception of reality.
 
ancient_mariner said:
There's a right price for everything, and while some will always want the latest, many are happy to use the same kit for a long time. I've been using my A7III since 2018, and I would be completely happy with Lightroom from that year if I'd had the option. Unfortunately in order to get camera compatibility I had to become a subscriber.
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Do we actually know the decision to not renew the LR subscription has anything to do with costs?
 
Just Saying, On1 Photoraw has a lightroom migration tool. It won't do everything but google if interested. They offer onetime and subscription licenses.

I no longer use lightroom so can't answer that part of the question, maybe some preset is applied on inport.
 
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I have tried the migration tool around 4-5 years ago. It might work if you have smaller catalogues, but with 50,000 images it bogged down a moderately powerful (at the time) computer for days and never brought over more than a fraction of the images. My plan was to leave Lightroom because of the subscription requirement, but this wasn't an effective solution *for me*.
 
Thanks for the replies. My decision is really about value rather than cost. Adobe are going to charge me £15 per month. I could hunt around for a deal, but I really only use 5% of the functionality, I can't remember the last time I used PS so it just doesn't deliver value for money.

Interesting to know that the catalogue still works without a subscription but if darktable can import it then might as well move over
 
sirch said:
Thanks for the replies. My decision is really about value rather than cost. Adobe are going to charge me £15 per month. I could hunt around for a deal, but I really only use 5% of the functionality, I can't remember the last time I used PS so it just doesn't deliver value for money.

Interesting to know that the catalogue still works without a subscription but if darktable can import it then might as well move over
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It won't import the catalogue, but if you have your metadata in XMP sidecar files, Darktable will read (and continue to work with) the XMP sidecar files. Making this metadata, and any metadata changes available to other programs. But as I said, unlike most programs LR doesn't write XMP sidecar files by default.
 
I left the Photoshop/Lightroom package years ago and replaced it with PhotoLab & Affinity - I'm still on PL5 and Affinity 1 (neither available now).
With the advent of my purchase of the Q2 Monochrom I had to adjust to the fact that neither PL5 or Affinity would open monochrome RAW files, so I tried Darktable and didn't find it too steep a learning curve so opened RAW monochrome files in Darktable then exported to make them available to the other software.

With the advent of a recent Lightroom offer (£58) I thought I would give it a try and quickly saw that it had moved on since a last looked years ago!
I like many of its features, not the least being able to open RAW monochrome files so I'm going to stick with it a while. I generally use a combination of the software packages as I can make use of an early NIK package but with mocOS 28 coming I will have to decide what to do as the old NIK and several other of my software programmes (Epson etc) will face issues.
 
sirch said:
Thanks for the replies. My decision is really about value rather than cost. Adobe are going to charge me £15 per month. I could hunt around for a deal, but I really only use 5% of the functionality, I can't remember the last time I used PS so it just doesn't deliver value for money.

Interesting to know that the catalogue still works without a subscription but if darktable can import it then might as well move over
Click to expand...

My understanding is that you can continue to view your edited images, but not edit further.
 
ancient_mariner said:
My understanding is that you can continue to view your edited images, but not edit further.
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Yes, in Lightroom Classic, the develop, sync to cloud and map modules stop working but the quick develop arrows in the Library module, and presets still work. It's not that bad a deal really.

After 5 years of subscription, Capture One gives you a free perpetual license. Which is fully working but doesn't get any updates. I assume the lack of updates will also apply to LR Classic
 
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