Desperately seeking Lightroom replacement

[KC Honie]

On 5/3/2022 at 4:24 PM, RichardMH said:

NeoFinder/abeMeda seems another option for image management. Think I looked at it in the past.

I have neofinder, it is very nice...

[Marshalleq]

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.

[Marshalleq]

@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?

[RichardMH]

1 hour ago, Marshalleq said:

@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?

If you just want to review RAW photos quickly, FastRawViewer is the go.

https://www.fastrawviewer.com/

[Robert Gootz]

Well... thank you all for your replies. I have tested several app in the meantime. Right now, I am giving ACDsee Studio and Exile Foto a try - either an my Mac and also my Windows machine. I am struggling on my Mac which is due to I am on M1 - and plugins are simply not working anymore in Affinity Photo (which is poor, but another topic). 

What I see is that the search in Excire is incredible fast and a great DAM / photo organizer - but Excire doesn't recognize my Hasselblad raws neither on my Mac, nor an my Windows machine. ACDsee studio recognizes my Hasselblad raws on my Mac and can display a preview, recognizes these raws on Windows but cannot display a preview there. ACDsee can "look through" subfolders and bring a all previews (as Lightroom does is) but Excire can do this easily and damn' fast.

So - if you have no "exotic" raws (like me with Hasselblad) then you should give Excire Foto a try... as they have also a nice license policy which allows cross-installations on three devices.

Kind regards,

Robert

[PaoloT]

17 minutes ago, Robert Gootz said:

So - if you have no "exotic" raws (like me with Hasselblad)

Apple Photos supports several Hasselblad models. Maybe yours is included?

Paolo

 

[Marshalleq]

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.  

[PaoloT]

1 minute ago, Marshalleq said:

I use apple photos, but it is not a replacement for a library manager unfortunately.

May you tell something more about its limits? I’m seriously trying to understand why it is not working for some (or for many).

Paolo

 

[Marshalleq]

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.