Marshalleq

I am struggling to keep up with this thread - but am interested, what do you use now? Lightroom?

Nobody said affinity was going to be Lightroom, quite the opposite, that it isn't and we need a product to fit that gap. I looked at Dx) photo lab, it is nearly a contender, but it doesn't have maps. Quite a basic feature really despite a quick google showing it has been requested years ago. Photo Supreme is interesting, very basic, also doesn't have maps, but fits a niche need. The thing is that a core capability of a photo manager is to be able to find images, one of the find methods I use to find images a lot is maps. So Lightroom still wins. Even free products like Digikam have maps, albeit ugly maps, but at least you can find photos. As you can see above and below, typically these candidates have failings ranging from price to features. It's always something. Lightroom is extremely hard to beat at what you get for the money. I think that's the problem, Adobe have actually set our expectations quite high. Capture one is $584 USD for a perpetual license and I includes only the version that you get at that time and only guaranteed to support the os it was made for at that time. This is appalling - you would be FAR better off with a Lightroom subscription. Not a valid option. From the capture one site: "Getting a perpetual license means you get the current version of Capture One that’s available at the time of purchase and you can continue to keep using that version as long as your hardware and operating system support it. The license doesn’t automatically update when new features are released like the subscription, so you you’ll need to purchase a new perpetual license if you want later the latest tools and updates." I tweeted Serif about it a couple of days ago, this is their response: So keep making noise is my advice. Actually, what would be good is if everyone here started tweeting them, the thing is public tweets are generally read and answered to, because they're public and there are obligations to act in a way conducive to your brand image. That might get them to recognise it and set a priority. https://x.com/affinitybyserif?s=20

Yeah, I think a lot of people don't understand what a photo management application is and why it's so valuable. Even my cousin in the industry just uses bridge and he keeps telling me to teach him Lightroom one day - and he owns it! But I guess the key someone mentioned here (and adobe clearly realises with their photographer bundle), is a photo editor is not enough on its own. You need some way of managing the photos and organising them, rating them and then you know what? Add some basic adjustment capability and for the rest of it, integration for a full blown editor. I don't know why this concept is so hard to grasp. If you're going to have a photo editor for photos, those people are going to have lots of photos and they need something to manage them with. I've bought all of Serifs products, both v1 and v2 including for iPad - though I never use the iPad stuff. Mostly I use the photo editor - I'm not an artist. And I combine the photo editor mostly with Exposure, though I've been trying out digikam again lately, it's pretty good. Serif would make such an awesome and more polished version and I think looking at their pricing model would quickly become the defect standard, perhaps even becoming the catalyst for the photographer crowd to move away from Adobe. One things for sure, they won't do it if there's no photo manager, cause it's so crucial.

Just registering my vote for this, actually I have a post from some time back asking for alternatives because I, like many, are on subscription overload. The upshot of that was any alternatives to Lightroom either cost more or do not work properly or are not photo managers. I was prepared to pay more for perpetual from one of the good ones, but it turned out their perpetual was only perpetual within the major version number, so not perpetual at all. I have owned and used exposure for years and it's great but it doesn't have a catalog so its slow and doesn't work so well with large photo libraries. So please Affinity, despite some strangely defeatist attitudes on here, the length of this thread and others proves you have a market for it. Many thanks.

I'm glad you wrote this, because I had forgotten there was a workaround. No I didn't run into any issues like this, except maybe that I recall you need to give it exactly the right type of input file that it wants - follow a guide for that. It's truly been ages but I think it wanted a dng file maybe or along those lines. It could be that.

Capture One USD$576 for perpetual licence - renewable at each version so not actually perpetual. Or USD$28.65 per month. No thanks. May as well just get Adobe suite at that price. This is always the problem, they're competing with Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop and that space and yet nobody actually competes.

Agreed, this should be a high priority! And reminding them is a good idea. I had a thread like this over at roonlabs, which lasted for something like four years. In the end we got what we asked for, even though it took a long time. And I think a key part of that success was that everyone kept chiming in and keeping the thread alive, it was even split and rejoined a few times due to the conversation. So it definitely doesn't hurt to speak up and should not be discouraged, it takes only a little time after all and shouldn't offend anyone if you're polite.

For me these things are top of mind: To store all my photo's in it, I surpass the total purchasable storage requirement because I have shot RAW for at least a decade. Without RAW I cannot get the best edits. Without RAW I need to have compressed copies of everything to find stuff if I don't have a decent library manager and actually this is exactly what I've done - converted everything to jpeg and put them into apple photos so that I can manage them at the required speed. It's horrible. Even if apple did have a storage tier that would fit all my current and future photographs the price of that is already horrendous, and it would be cheaper to use Lightroom which is the very thing I'm trying to get away from. Then The library sometimes has hiccups. Like where photos won't upload, or download. Where suddenly it stops processing for example face recognition or just requires me to delete my photo database and redownload it. Then of course because it's on device processing, everything has to be processed again. Which takes weeks even on an m1 pro. I can't just point it at my whole library externally like you can with Lightroom or similar and even when you do get around it, the corruption issue means it's not worth the effort. The corruption issue is actually not really happening at the moment, but track record of Apple suggests that it will happen again sometime as it has on and off for years - I simply don't trust it. There isn't really a workflow in Apple photo's either. it doesn't integrate with other apps well or even at all in some cases. It's really designed to be in it's own walled garden and not to play nice with other stuff too much - even if that's possible in some areas. That's off the top of my head.

I'll give that one a look thanks. So you're also finding there are a lot of products, but there's always something major missing. I'm still gunning for the upcoming fix in exposure software's 'exposure' for library speed - it's still the only product out there that doesn't cost a fortune and has all the features. @PaoloT I use apple photos, but it is not a replacement for a library manager unfortunately. And it's a bit temperamental with large libraries at times. I even tried using it with RAW for a while - the cost of storage got me - though I understand you can run it without iCloud which reduces features and makes it even more complicated, but that could be an angle to progress.

Thanks for the explanation. I wonder if I can cross grade it back to a non-mac App Store version. Oh well.

Oh boy, I would usually get this from the web site, but in this case I wasn't aware you could do that and got it from the App Store. Hopefully there aren't any missing features. I don't have any additional fonts, just the standard fonts with Mac OS.

I'm getting hit by this when exporting from Exposure Software to Affinity Photo. It says affinity photo doesn't have access, even though affinity photo has been assigned full disk access in Mac. This seems to indicate that this is an affinity photo problem and a very annoying one at that. I can export from Exposure software to any other of my editing apps, Adobe products, Topaz products etc. Only Affinity has this issue.

@KC Honie I don't know about this program. It's finished scanning now, it's kinda ugly but it's kinda not all at the same time. The preview is small and it sort of doesn't provide any better option, I don't think it can rate things very quickly but perhaps there's a keyboard shortcut or something. It does support just to view all photos in subfolders (amazing how much software fails on just that point), but because it's a smart folder you actually lose what folder you're in and there's not easy way to limit to a subset like other tools. I also don't know how to rate things quickly yet, seems like that's not possible, not really sure. Any tips? How do you use it?

Not wanting to miss an opportunity I have downloaded neofinder. I stopped it from scanning the network copy of my files as I could see it would be too slow. Im currently scanning the same files I have on a local thunderbolt connected SSD. It's been a good 5 minutes so far and has only gotten through 7,000 files which is slower progress than some of the others, but I could live with that if it just updates incrementally in the future (it does). On the sample page it was hard to figure out how I could use this, but looking at the small portion of what was scanned from the network, it now shows up with a few more options, including 'open with' which allowed me to open with Affinity and a huge list of other apps it detected as photo apps (the ones I downloaded from the suggestions above and a few more). It's heritage is CD cataloging, in fact that used to be it's name, CDFinder - so it's a sort of unlikely candidate here, being that cataloging is typically different to managing, but the two probably cross over quite a bit. It's going to take probably an hour or two to scan my files - which I have to say is probably the slowest of all the things I've tried, but given it's incremental that is fine. After that I'll take another look. Thanks for the suggestion. Also, in case anyone reading this is wondering, NeoFinder is39.99US for the first version, then an upgrade price of 25.99. They also accept cross grades from other products, which might've some clues about some other products to try out. This is probably one of the cheaper products out there, though initially on the face of it, also one of the most basic, but perhaps there are more features I will find once my library is scanned in. 20 mins in and 34,000 files scanned.

Agreed and you raise another good point I did not above, the equation may be different if you're a pro photographer. I'm not, nor do I intend to be, so for me the way I weigh it up is different to those that are.