I think Capture One Pro is superior to Lightroom in everything but the library system that is offered with Lightroom, though what is provided in Capture One Pro is still very good.

https://www.captureone.com/en/store

I always found the library system in Lightroom to be painful only because of how slow it is. It's hard to imagine enough features to make up for a UI that routinely takes >1s to render images onto the page.

That's what got me to switch off Lightroom, and Capture One's excellent other features kept me on the latter. Highly recommended.

I never got into the catalogs/sessions way of managing my library but Capture One is my favourite processing tool. So I use digiKam to manage my library and Capture One to process the individual photos.

Interesting. Capture One is a non destructive photo editor: how does that not force to use Capture One for managing your library as well? Is digiKam able to access the post-process images from Capture One?

I don't care as much about seeing the unedited thumbnail previews in digiKam as long as I can find what I'm looking for, and then edit and print from Capture One.

Capture One looks great but it's way more expensive than Lightroom. Lightroom is $120 a year. Capture One is $500 and $150 for an upgrade between versions or $240 a year.

Note that you can buy edition that are limited to one maker (Fujifilm or Sony) for quite a bit cheaper than the whole package. Combined with semi-regular sales/promo code (check the fujirumors or sonyrumors website), you can get a perpetual version for very interesting price: I reckon having bought the Fujifilm edition for about 125$.

You do have to commit to camera brand though.

This. I got my Sony license for $50.

I was just about to post Capture One!!

Same, recently heard about Darktable, planning to give it a shot now that I don't have Lighroom anymore

https://www.darktable.org

Darktable is abysmal, sadly. It is my go-to example for the failure of f/oss to fulfill common professional software needs.

Affinity is "thinking about" a digital asset management tool.

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/78025-when...

If they do make one, it may or may not have editing features built in (vs shipping you out to Affinity Photo).

But I'm in the same boat. Stuck on CS6, couldn't stand DarkTable, haven't bothered trying any other alternatives.

(I'm building a DAM: check my profile if you'd like to be part of the closed beta!)

I'm interested, but whatever DAM I eventually move to will in large part be driven by how well it can import my years of Lightroom library (including edits out of the xmp sidecar files and at least approximating Lightroom's RAW rendering). I know that's a big ask, don't suppose it's on your roadmap?

The current version added support for importing sidecar metadata. It does not apply LR edits to the previews it shows, though (which would require re-implementing swaths of LR...).

If you see something you want when you try the beta, please tell me!

I imported a 70k item library into mylio and it ingested it fairly well, along with the xmp sidecar files. I try to avoid doing edits on my images, so I haven't tested how well it imports throughly although.

I recommend Luminar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_83opqLxyU

I can't quite recommend Luminar over Ps/Lr because i've never used the latter, but Luminar seems good enough, and it also seems to be getting better.

I've been getting into photo editing recently, and searched online for a few hours to learn about the differences between the various options. From what i gathered, Luminar (which is a pay once for a lifetime license that you can have installed in up to five machines at a time) is a serious contender to Ps/Lr even at the professional level, let alone at the amateur/occasional user level.

I moved from Lightroom to Capture One Pro and eventually settled on Darktable.

It took a bit of getting used to (still not a fan of the UI and its obsession with "film rolls" every time I import something) but once I did it's quite nice. Images come out looking good and it has a handy Lua scripting environment and CLI with which you can automate many tasks.

There is https://rawtherapee.com/ and https://www.darktable.org/

Have you tried AfterShot Pro by Corel? I don't use it, but that's just because I still use (and love) Bibble 5 from 2011, which is the software that was bought by Corel and turned into AfterShot Pro. I had a quick glance at the manual of the latter, and it seems like the batch processing and other things are still intact, so I'm hopeful it still might be worth checking out.

I actually feel Adobe’s Photography Plan is pretty good value. LR Mobile on iPad is excellent, worth it for that alone

Indeed. I used to use LR Classic on my Mac, but since the new LR got more and more features I switched to using my iPad almost exclusively. I don't think I used LR on my Mac in months.

Have you tried ON1 Photo Raw?

Have you considered Polarr?

That appears to be just the editor part. The asset management in LR is really what I use most.