From Lightroom to My Own Apps
I started using Lightroom in 2006, more or less the moment it became available in public beta. The program has been part of my workflow all these years. That adds up to a lot of images. A lot of keywords, collections — on the whole a spacious and at the same time curated catalog.
So when I now, after twenty years with Adobe and Lightroom, have cancelled the subscription and uninstalled the software, it is not something done in the heat of the moment.
The problem — or what I gradually came to see as a problem — is the very thing I used to consider Lightroom's strength: Lightroom "does everything". It has a catalog, it has raw development, but also web galleries, a print module, a book module — a module for nearly anything you could think of.
But this has a flip side: As far as the catalog goes, everything lives there: ratings, keywords, development history, collections. Which means you cannot simply adopt other software and bring all that history with you. Then came the subscription model, and with it the price hikes. And eventually generative AI — with questions it is hard to get clear answers to: What are the models trained on? Where is Adobe heading? The incentives to look around eventually outnumbered the reasons to stay.
The thought that finally settled was simple enough: you can create so-called sidecar, or XMP, files for your image files. Which in principle means everything I do in Lightroom can live in a small text file right next to the raw files, readable by any program. That would make the image files portable in an entirely different way — and open the door to specialized software for each part of the workflow.
This is not a revolutionary idea. It is just not how Lightroom is built. And after twenty years behind both camera and catalog I knew what I needed — and what I expected. So I started building my own solutions.
Photo Developer
A RAW developer for macOS with a film-like rendering. There are no magic buttons hiding what happens under the hood. Every control is parametric, which in practice means every adjustment that can be made is visible — if you or the program change something, it shows in the sliders. Images are stored as ordinary files with open sidecar files, not in a proprietary database.
Photo Archive
Photo Archive is the image archive. Point the program at the folders that make up your library. No import process, no catalog. Keywords, collections, ratings and other metadata live in XMP files next to the images. The program builds a small database for fast lookups and for its own "smart collections", but it is based on information already present in the XMP files, and exists purely for convenience.
Alongside these two main apps I have built a handful of specialized programs. Photo Culler handles the selects — go through a full memory card, keep what holds up, discard the rest. Others cover ingest, and a couple of post-raw editing apps exist for more creative work. The apps talk to each other through the XMP files — the same open format Adobe invented.
Sharing got its own app too. The galleries on this website — Kunstfoto, Serier — are served by it. In other words, you are looking at the toolbox in use right now.
Leaving Adobe meant letting go of some things. Day to day, though, the difference is smaller than I feared. The keyboard shortcuts are the same — that mattered. Twenty years of muscle memory does not rewrite itself. And, if I may say so, the raw developer is not just a joy to use, it does a good job. (Which, strictly speaking, it had to — had it not measured up to Lightroom, I would not have cancelled the Lightroom subscription. And where it seems to surpass Lightroom in areas that matter to me, that is a clear win.)
What feels most right is that my images are now just files on disk, with the important metadata as text files beside them: My images, my metadata, my creative decisions — stored in an open format, readable by the naked eye.
It really is no more dramatic than that. And the programs? They are pretty good :) Now for the part that matters: getting out to photograph. And putting them to use.
For the technically curious: the apps are part of a larger toolbox for photographers on macOS — Photo Suite at digtek.app.