What are the cool kids using for photo management/editing these days?
I've still got Lightroom Classic installed and haven't used it for a while but just tried and it's absolutely unusably slow.
Discussion
This is what I use in my extremely limited graphical editing capacity.
Affinity Photo if you want a photoshop alternative that doesn’t come with a subscription attached.
Darktable if you want FOSS with organization capability. ( https://darktable.org )
GIMP for a poor man’s photoshop, good for simple edits.
i don't think gimp is that poor of features but maybe the interface seems a bit more clunky, it can do almost all the things at least, of Photoshop CS (that's how long it's been since i used photoshop)
if this tooling now also means stupid AI generators then yeah good luck going without a subscription, them kilowatts gotta be paid for lel
There is a massive gap between the capabilities of the two, once you get past the simple edits. The same can be accomplished by hand in both, but it’ll take much longer and parts will have to be done by hand.
I’m not sure how much of it is AI assistance. Affinity is cheap enough and good enough I don’t deal with GIMP for anything complex.
I think darktable (which is FOSS) is more what he’s looking for since he’s using Lightroom.
There are no cool kids anymore.
GIMP
I shifted to Photomator and PixelMator Pro. Lifetime license. Will be trying AffinityPhoto next. Decided to simplify my life and go back to basic photo folder management rather than catalogs. I use a separate app to rename files based on exif info upon import. Does mean sidecar files are generated when editing but I can live with that. Had enough of Adobe. Nice to just edit photos and not be locked out of my edits if I don’t sign in, aka Adobe.
Yeah. This has always killed me. It’s been a long time since I’ve done much photography tho so I just tried to ignore it. Going to have to bite the bullet soon though I think.
Varies from photographer to photographer I guess. I know some who just edit in the software that comes with their camera. Others do very little to their photos - maybe just a few edits in ACDSee, Gimp, et al and then save in local folders. Plus others who still shoot film and scan their images into folders. Then those who’ve turned their back on dedicated cameras and solely use their cameraphones, cloud storage and the phone’s ML/automated archiving, dating, location etc. I had been using Lightroom extensively for 15 years but not only did it get slower, as you say; it also went full creative cloud and subscription and that’s when the hatred started. Then changes to user agreements and privacy were the last straw. Good luck with the bullet biting and hope you find something that suits you. BTW your computer will likely feel faster when all traces of Adobe are removed. (I went extreme and wiped my MacBook to start afresh - Adobe has a tendency to spread installation/operation files all over the place).
Using gimp for ages now 😄
Capture One for raw development, basic editing and management + Affinity Photo for serious pixel editing.
I’ve have been using Adobe Creative Cloud Photography Plan for years but I quitted using Adobe products almost 4 years ago!
If you need video editing, move to Davinci Resolve and don’t look back!
Use Gimp, it’s open source adobe.