Why won't Serif listen to customer needs and create a Lightroom alternative for us?

[KrazyPetes]

Serif, you are clearly an Adobe competitor. So why won't you listen to your customers and release a Lightroom alternative? With AI now one of your biggest requests you have a golden opportunity to create a photo management/storage/database/photo development app with AI features that will bring a ton of customers to your platform. Offer this with a discount to V2 bundle customers and you can make enough money to fund the development of that single app. I want local processing speed, and I want local management but with the smarts being offered by Google Photos search. GPhotos has super powerful search, I can type "fruits" and will bring results with photos that contain fruit. Could be paintings of fruits in a bowl, a street market stall, or a fruit tree. If I say "fruit trees" it is smart enough to narrow it for me. That would be incredible in a photo management app. To have auto-tagging, geolocation from merely analyzing the picture, I think this is called reverse geocoding. You are missing a massive chance here.

[fde101]

Welcome to the forums!

Can't speak for Serif, but consider that this would be one more thing on top of what they are doing already and probably would have a negative effect on their ability to continue to develop the products they already have on the market, so it probably can't be justified given that there is a lot more competition in that space and users are already complaining left and right about features that are missing in the products Serif has released already.  Serif is a small company and their developers are already spread thin with the products they are currently maintaining.

[PaoloT]

Looks like an easy thing to do. If Google did it, it shouldn't be all that difficult or expensive!

 

[Archangel]

On 10/2/2023 at 11:25 AM, KrazyPetes said:

Serif, you are clearly an Adobe competitor. So why won't you listen to your customers and release a Lightroom alternative? With AI now one of your biggest requests you have a golden opportunity to create a photo management/storage/database/photo development app with AI features that will bring a ton of customers to your platform. Offer this with a discount to V2 bundle customers and you can make enough money to fund the development of that single app. I want local processing speed, and I want local management but with the smarts being offered by Google Photos search. GPhotos has super powerful search, I can type "fruits" and will bring results with photos that contain fruit. Could be paintings of fruits in a bowl, a street market stall, or a fruit tree. If I say "fruit trees" it is smart enough to narrow it for me. That would be incredible in a photo management app. To have auto-tagging, geolocation from merely analyzing the picture, I think this is called reverse geocoding. You are missing a massive chance here.

I agree that Serif would benefit from creating a media manager Lightroom alternative, another option would be to allow Affinity Photo, Designer and Publisher to link to an already existing alternative such as Faststone viewer, XnViewMP, Darktable or Digikam. Of course, this might be difficult to achieve with Serif's software development policy.

[v_kyr]

On 10/3/2023 at 12:23 PM, PaoloT said:

Looks like an easy thing to do. If Google did it, it shouldn't be all that difficult or expensive!

LOL, sure ...

• Adobe number of employees ~29.239
• Alphabet: number of full-time employees ~190,234
• Google UK Limited's so UK only ~5,701 employees
• Capture One number of employees ~181
• DxO number of employees ~89
• Serif UK number of employees ~93

[PaoloT]

49 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

LOL, sure ...

Are you implying that Serif can't buy them and get their technology anytime they want???

 

[v_kyr]

21 minutes ago, PaoloT said:

Are you implying that Serif can't buy them and get their technology when they want???

Whome?

No I meant more that they don't have enough employees (and among these developers) for such additional & concurrent tasks. - Another thing to mention here is, that none of the major business players in this field, is dependent on third party open source libraries such as LibRaw and Lensfun etc.

[KrazyPetes]

It saddens me to see a defeatist attitude here. Like there's no faith in their ability to produce such a product. I believe they have the resources. Perhaps they should stop focusing on such a niche product as an iPad version because face it, iPads are toys, not real production machines. Then they could leverage code from Photo to do processing. Most of the work would be database management, organization, tagging, classification whether manual or AI-assisted. There's free tensorflow models for object recognition already out there. Netxcloud uses it. A lot of the code that Affinity needs to make a DAM is already present in Photo. But Photo has no DAM capabilities. I don't really care if they just give Photo DAM functionality and add the missing bits. But I think it's better if they have a fourth product, this way they can decouple the development and be more agile in making changes to one or another according to user needs and priorities. Why does it make me sad to see people arguing that resources are an issue? Because Adobe started small too. And they are such a behemoth company because they built up their products slowly but surely. Let's not forget that Adobe also bought Macromedia back in the 2000s. Serif could explore the option of acquiring a competitor or it could just build from scratch but using Photo source code for the most part. It is not easy but there's no denying that Serif is now pretty much the only serious multi-platform non-subscription option for Photo editing that resembles Photoshop but without the crazy price tag. I don't believe in this line of thinking "they can't do, they don't have the resource". It's all about prioritizing and planning to make money with a product lots of people want vs wasting time on an iPad version that is crippled from the start because the hardware platform itself is crippled by Apple and their inferior OS paradigm. Agree or disagree, there are people needing and willing to pay for a Lightroom alternative. I tried CaptureOne Pro 23 and it's abysmal - it can't even play Sony A7IV XAVC videos. It can't even play DJI Mini 4 Pro HEVC videos. It's slow. Serif has a golden opportunity to obliterate the competition here. It sits on a comfy chair and lets someone else take the lead, it will regret it forever.

[Frozen Death Knight]

18 hours ago, KrazyPetes said:

It saddens me to see a defeatist attitude here. Like there's no faith in their ability to produce such a product. I believe they have the resources. Perhaps they should stop focusing on such a niche product as an iPad version because face it, iPads are toys, not real production machines. Then they could leverage code from Photo to do processing. Most of the work would be database management, organization, tagging, classification whether manual or AI-assisted. There's free tensorflow models for object recognition already out there. Netxcloud uses it. A lot of the code that Affinity needs to make a DAM is already present in Photo. But Photo has no DAM capabilities. I don't really care if they just give Photo DAM functionality and add the missing bits. But I think it's better if they have a fourth product, this way they can decouple the development and be more agile in making changes to one or another according to user needs and priorities. Why does it make me sad to see people arguing that resources are an issue? Because Adobe started small too. And they are such a behemoth company because they built up their products slowly but surely. Let's not forget that Adobe also bought Macromedia back in the 2000s. Serif could explore the option of acquiring a competitor or it could just build from scratch but using Photo source code for the most part. It is not easy but there's no denying that Serif is now pretty much the only serious multi-platform non-subscription option for Photo editing that resembles Photoshop but without the crazy price tag. I don't believe in this line of thinking "they can't do, they don't have the resource". It's all about prioritizing and planning to make money with a product lots of people want vs wasting time on an iPad version that is crippled from the start because the hardware platform itself is crippled by Apple and their inferior OS paradigm. Agree or disagree, there are people needing and willing to pay for a Lightroom alternative. I tried CaptureOne Pro 23 and it's abysmal - it can't even play Sony A7IV XAVC videos. It can't even play DJI Mini 4 Pro HEVC videos. It's slow. Serif has a golden opportunity to obliterate the competition here. It sits on a comfy chair and lets someone else take the lead, it will regret it forever.

Portable devices like an iPad are hardly niche products. Even professionals use touch screen devices for working, especially as the tech has become significantly better in terms of performance with the Metal run chips. Serif even did an interview with a Japanese website where the owner even stated that the iPad version of Designer was outselling the desktop version in Japan while being their 4th largest market after the US, UK, and Germany. See source:

It is not about being defeatist, it is about being realistic. Serif are significantly smaller than Adobe with fewer resources to expand into every creative market. If they thought it was a good idea to prioritise a DAM software they likely would have done so by now. Heck, they may even have something planned at some point, but there is more than enough things to improve for the other three softwares before the need to build another one. It's not until last year that we even got the complete trinity on all platforms, which was the original goal when building the Affinity Suite. The customer base already have a ton of requests for Photo, Designer, and Publisher, so it's a smart thing to cater to the already existing audience by adding and polishing up these three, especially in such a competitive market with the new AI boom as of late.

Also, please format your sentences.

[loukash]

13 hours ago, KrazyPetes said:

faith

13 hours ago, KrazyPetes said:

believe

Affinity is not a religion and Serif is not a church. At least not the last time I checked, hehe…  

When Serif are ready to announce a new product, they will.
Until then, all we can do is post feedback and bump existing feature requests to let them know what we'd like.

And yes, I'd love to have a modern equivalent of the good ole iView/Expression Media DAM, better yesterday rather than in ten years! Whether it comes from Serif or from someone else. (Some developers are already getting quite close to it, yet still not what I'd need. Dang.)

[Bryan Rieger]

14 hours ago, KrazyPetes said:

Perhaps they should stop focusing on such a niche product as an iPad version because face it, iPads are toys, not real production machines.

Um, yeah, sure… FWIW if Serif ceased support for iPads I (as a designer and illustrator) wouldn't be using Affinity products at all. I get that some folks really want a DAM, and some folks really want {insert your product/feature request here}, but please let's not minimize others priorities because they don't align with yours. 

At the end of the day it all comes down to Serif's priorities for their products, and their business.

 

[KrazyPetes]

No problem, you all enjoy your iPad-based Serif products.

I hope my properly formatted sentence won't trigger anyone this time.

Obviously without a DAM on offer it's practically impossible to know what sells best, an iPad app or a DAM app.

I'm done here. If users don't want to give a damn, Serif won't give a DAM.

#unfollowed

Edited November 16, 2023 by KrazyPetes

[dvoth]

While for my needs I am able to work with the software I have, I thought I would note as someone who has had Affinity Photo since it came out for the Mac this was one of the first major requests. One thing I think that has been particularly frustrating for users, is that there have been conflicting comments about this being worked on.

[Frozen Death Knight]

3 hours ago, KrazyPetes said:

No problem, you all enjoy your iPad-based Serif products.

I hope my properly formatted sentence won't trigger anyone this time.

Obviously without a DAM on offer it's practically impossible to know what sells best, an iPad app or a DAM app.

I'm done here. If users don't want to give a damn, Serif won't give a DAM.

#unfollowed

Lol! I don't even use Apple products because I heavily dislike practically anything Apple. Still, I am not going to deny reality just because of that.

[Chills]

Recently (November 2023) in another place, a video editor was giving his reasons to come off Adobe Sw.  Various replacements were suggested, including Affinity, for the usual apps and reasons. (also Resolve for Video Editing)
The ONLY thing people can't find a good replacement for is Lightroom. 
Lightroom is a photo-management tool.   A catalogue system.   If Serif do a photo-catalouge system that works with Photo it would be a winner.  Many , like me are still on Lightroom 6.14 which was the last stand alone perpetual licence before CC. Certainly, all the world's photo-journalists love Lightroom.
 

[fde101]

5 hours ago, Chills said:

The ONLY thing people can't find a good replacement for is Lightroom. 

Multiple candidates have been pointed out already on several threads which have been opened here in the past - Capture One, On1 Photo RAW, etc.

[Chills]

10 hours ago, fde101 said:

Multiple candidates have been pointed out already on several threads which have been opened here in the past - Capture One, On1 Photo RAW, etc.

None of which are anywhere near Lightroom for cataloguing. They are slowly improving that aspect but... 
For one thing none of them have the mapping section nor the web gallery generation AFAIK

Photo Supreme looks interesting. You are right that Photo won't replace Lightroom in the same way Photoshop and Bridge don't.

[KC Honie]

Following (in red) is a note that I sent to Serif.  Because of the Capture One subscription debacle I eventually left Capture One (after trialing a number of apps) and went back to Lightroom and Photoshop.  After installing and using photoshop it is apparent how far behind Affinity is falling.

I like to say that the core of Affinity Develop is already done in Affinity Photo, simply strip out the develop module and wrap a DAM around it and you are ready to go.  Then your raw engine is consistent across the suite of your photo manipulation tools.  That is the reason that when switching back to Lightroom it only makes sense to move back to Photoshop as well.

Serif didn't bother to answer, just crickets...

****************************************************************************

I am a retired investment banker, strategist, marketer, and now photographer / creative.

As I am certain that you are aware Capture One was popular in part because they had a robust perpetual licensing model (plus a fantastic product). Many of the same reasons that Affinity apps are very popular.  I use the full suite of Affinity products.

Capture One has made a move to force users into a defacto subscription model and ANGRY does not begin to explain the sentiment of the ~50% of users that are perpetual licensees.

Opportunity

The opportunity for Serif is for "Affinity Develop", an application that is a competitor to Lightroom, Capture One, DxO, etc.  While not a trivial task to develop, the core is already done in Affinity Photo, simply strip out the develop module and wrap a DAM around it and you are ready to go.

I would hope that Affinity Develop (as I like to call it) is in actuality fairly far along. Now would be a GREAT time to "leak" that news.

Threat

The threat is much more subtle, like many C1P users I am now looking at alternatives such as DxO, LR, Topaz Labs, RawTherapee, and Dark Table.

If people bite the bullet and return to Adobe (I am an Adobe refuge from the subscription licensing model) then not only do they get Lightroom but also Photoshop and LR for iPad. Thereby depreciating Affinity Photo.

I am personally trialing all of the app mentioned above. It would be fantastic to have a complete Serif Affinity suite including "Affinity Develop".  Roundtrips between it and Affinity Photo would be much more elegant than between Capture One and Affinity Photo.

[KC Honie]

On 11/26/2023 at 5:34 AM, Chills said:

None of which are anywhere near Lightroom for cataloguing. They are slowly improving that aspect but... 
For one thing none of them have the mapping section nor the web gallery generation AFAIK

Photo Supreme looks interesting. You are right that Photo won't replace Lightroom in the same way Photoshop and Bridge don't.

For us refugees from Capture One, who opted to go back to Lightroom, LR's cataloging function is light years ahead of Capture One.

I used to create a new catalog for for each shoot, because C1P's catalog is so unstable...

I personally was willing to take the lesser capability of Affinity's Raw Engine (assuming they released Affinity Develop) to get commonality across all apps.  I may yet take advantage of Adobe's $30/month offer for their Creative Suite...

Clearly I don't fit the target customer profile for Affinity.

[Chills]

8 hours ago, KC Honie said:

For us refugees from Capture One, who opted to go back to Lightroom, LR's cataloging function is light years ahead of Capture One.

I used to create a new catalog for for each shoot, because C1P's catalog is so unstable...

I personally was willing to take the lesser capability of Affinity's Raw Engine to get commonality across all apps.  I may yet take advantage of Adobe's $30/month offer for their Creative Suite...

Clearly I don't fit the target customer profile for Affinity.

I use Lightroom for cataloguing and either Lightroom or Dxo Photo Lab for conversion.
I don't use Affinity Photo for RAW conversion.,

[KC Honie]

6 hours ago, Chills said:

I use Lightroom for cataloguing and either Lightroom or Dxo Photo Lab for conversion.
I don't use Affinity Photo for RAW conversion.,

I edited my post to make it clearer, I don't use Affinity's raw engine either.  I had been using Capture One as my RAW developer and have subsequently transitioned back to Lightroom.  Both Lightroom's and Capture One Pro's raw developer engines are MUCH MUCH stronger than Affinity's.

I was using C1P as my developer and was round tripping between C1P and AP when I needed more than C1P could provide.  That is why I wanted an Affinity LR/C1P replacement, roundtripping would have been seamless.

Now I use LR and PS.  I still have AP loaded but I no longer use it...

For the price the affinity apps are great niche products, but they don't comprise a complete creative suite.  Serif still needs a LR competitor, and one could argue a DaVinci/Premier Pro competitor as well, but it would be hard to beat the entrenched video editors...

[Chills]

16 hours ago, KC Honie said:

The opportunity for Serif is for "Affinity Develop", an application that is a competitor to Lightroom, Capture One, DxO, etc.  While not a trivial task to develop, the core is already done in Affinity Photo, simply strip out the develop module and wrap a DAM around it and you are ready to go.

I would suggest Affinity Catalogue.  Ie a DAM.  This would be the primary use. They won't be able to compete with Dxo on RAW converters etc as DXO are/were a lens calibration lab. Their raw converter and lens correction is better than Adobe.   However their DAM is poor (but slowly improving)

If Affinity did a decent Catalogue program that would Catalogue, print, produce web galleries and had a map that could interface to A Photo and others like Dxo (as Lightroom does)  it would have a huge market.

There are thousands of photographers still on Lightroom 6.14 the last standalone perpetual licence version who would jump to any decent Catalogue program from Affinity.

[KC Honie]

6 minutes ago, Chills said:

I would suggest Affinity Catalogue.  Ie a DAM.  This would be the primary use. They won't be able to compete with Dxo on RAW converters etc as DXO are/were a lens calibration lab. Their raw converter and lens correction is better than Adobe.   However their DAM is poor (but slowly improving)

If Affinity did a decent Catalogue program that would Catalogue, print, produce web galleries and had a map that could interface to A Photo and others like Dxo (as Lightroom does)  it would have a huge market.

There are thousands of photographers still on Lightroom 6.14 the last standalone perpetual licence version who would jump to any decent Catalogue program from Affinity.

I don't disagree, but it has to be seamless, it cannot be a clone of Photoshop and Bridge...

[wonderings]

If Lightroom serves your needs and actually does it all well, I am not sure why people don't just keep using it. It sounds to me like people want it but don't want to pay for it. I wonder if Adobe and others are getting the same requests, please make it cheaper and you will have way more users.  Is there more the hobby photographer community wanting pro tools for non pro work?

[Pšenda]

43 minutes ago, wonderings said:

It sounds to me like people want it but don't want to pay for it.

I'm sure you've already registered a lot of requests/complaints/disappointment here - I'm from Adobe, I don't want to pay the gold-digger any more, but why doesn't Affinity do "exactly" the same thing as Adobe for a fraction of the price?! 🙂