Fallback Tools jack.baty.net
@jack I want to drop Lightroom (and thus my entire Adobe subscription) but it does 3 things I need: - Import from camera to named YYYY/MM/DD folders - easily scroll, zoom, & flag pics as Keep or Trash (or undecided) - apply tags
Those 3 features aren’t worth the cost of Lightroom (or alternatives I’ve seen). If you know of anything that does 1 or all 3 of these, please let me know.
@sirshannon I'm not a fan of the metadata handling tools of any of the editing apps I've used, so I purchased Photo Mechanic years ago and still use it for import, keywording, tagging, and culling. Not cheap, but really good at what it does.
@jack They do a good job of making it hard to find the price :/ Not cheap but appears to cover all of my needs and costs around 13 months of my PS+LR subscription. I’ve already decided Affinity Photo has replaced Photoshop for me but can’t cancel my subscription w/o a Lightroom replacement. Thank you! (FYI: my main camera is a Fuji X100T.)
@sirshannon The problem might be that Photo Mechanic isn't really a library and you'll still need an editor. For me PM works best for culling/keywording/etc. before importing into Lightroom (or something). So it didn't replace Lightroom for me, ultimately. I tried just using PM as a browser with Luminar as the editor for a while but found it a little cumbersome.
@jack yeah, I use PhotoMechanic for roughly the same things. Ingest, rename, add metadata, etc. Then I have a script that copies the photos onto my NAS and backs them up to S3. And Lightroom for cataloging, even though I don’t really like it and I barely use any of its functionality. I’m worried about its long term prospects now that they have the “cloud” version which isn’t really practical with the amount of data I have...
@jack I think I’m fine w/o Lightroom for editing. Mostly because I do so little “real” editing now now that I don’t do any photography work anymore. But you’ve reminded me that I haven’t fully tested that theory editing some less-than-perfect-soc photos without LR.
@jack I assign 1/2 of the blame the jpg presets in the X100T. They’re so good that I never bother with the RAWs. Even with the loss of dynamic range in the jpgs, they look better than what I get processing the RAW version. And when the RAW does end up better, it usually wasn’t worth the trouble.
So different from my Nikon days (D40, D200, D700, D800).