Adobe's Lightroom truly is a great and powerful tool like so many of their other apps, but I just can't stomach having years' worth of work locked up in a proprietary subscription-model app. And I just consider Apple Photos untrustworthy, though I do like to use it + iCloud shared photo albums to publish my edited "selects" instead of my full library.
Now if only there was a real F/LOSS contender to replace FCPX...
https://photostructure.com/about/introducing-photostructure/
It's currently in closed beta. I'm letting people in first-come-first-served roughly monthly, as I release new versions. It's free while in beta, in exchange for your feedback. Here's what's coming soon:
https://photostructure.com/about/release-notes/
Note that PhotoStructure doesn't have any editing tools other than fixing rotation. It does let you easily open the current image in other apps, though.
The project you are describing sounds close to my goals, with the possible exception of long-term storage: I've been planning to develop everything so that data is easily retrievable even if the software doesn't work. Metadata in text files, for example, image storage in well-known formats, folder structure that is understandable to humans, etc. This is for family archives: I'm scanning photos that are a hundred years old and I feel like an idiot when cataloging them using software that some company will obsolete in a couple of years.
Incidentally, there is another niche which is largely unaddressed: easy organizing of photos into sets with various access tags and sharing these with friends and family in a secure and easy way. It's kind-of doable today if you don't care about privacy, security, and longevity, but it's still annoyingly difficult to use, especially for less computer-literate family members. It seems that all designers of photo software only keep photos from their latest vacation, wipe their entire collection with each device upgrade, and want sharing links to be valid for at most a month or so.
One thing which could prevent me from using your software is lack of control: I got burned several times already and I'm considering my options carefully. It might be better to roll my own rather than start depending on something again.
File storage (if you opt for PhotoStructure doing automatic organization) is configurable (with a default of $library/yyyy/yyyy-mm-dd/$original-filename).
All metadata extracted or changed is saved in standard-format sidecars next to the original, or in the image itself. The sidecar format and whether to use sidecars for edits are both configurable.
The database is a SQLite DB with a straightforward schema (although as I add features, each version has had db migrations).
If you try PhotoStructure out, and you find or think of anything else I can do to set things up to be more friendly to long-term storage, I'd love to hear your ideas.
(Sharing is coming in a future release, both via any hierarchical tag, or by manually-selected images).
There is still the issue of control: I am worried about the lack of a "Pricing" page, not because I do not want to pay (quite the opposite), but because I am worried about the sustainability of your business. And about what will happen when you sell it to Google, or otherwise abandon it.
FWIW I've got a bunch of both scanned images and older JPGs that I inadvertently stripped all metadata from (if you use jpegtran to losslessly rotate, make sure you use `-copy`!), so PhotoStructure infers captured-at time from filenames or enclosing folder names if it's missing from the EXIF headers, and it can extract at least a reasonable year, month, and day from the path.
There's also PhotoStructure for Servers which can run under Docker, or as a standard node app (ala `git clone $url; photostructure/photostructure`).
My guess is that the same people, when given a native app, complain about the subscription pricing or the price tag.
And I happily pay for all of the quality native software I can find. One of the most exciting things is finding a well-crafted native application with a clear business model.
I'm really hoping Serif, for example, moves into the Photo organization space. I've already purchased all of their current apps even though I don't really need them all that much; probably 70% of the reason I bought them was just to support what they're doing.
One thing I like about Lightroom is that I can right-click on a folder and get a shareable, private link that people can go to to view the album. Great for sharing photos from a trip or an event without having to go to some other services.
The link opens a minimalist, unintrusive, functional album app where people can optionally download originals and even rate and comment on the photos, which is nice when you want to work together to whittle a larger set of candidates down to a smaller set.
None of that sharing and cloud stuff of lightroom though. It's just a RAW/photo processor.
https://www.azuloxworkshops.com/educational/capture-one/capt...
With regards to Apple Photos, I have ~130k photos synched without issues (that I can tell). No problems with iCloud sync either these days.
I also double sync the photos as JPG to Google Photos.
Having everything in Apple Photos is great for mobile browsing... the other night I pulled up images from 2006 on my iPhone!
I can’t open the photo library from other apps on iOS; it hangs forever. So I have to pick the photo from Photos and share into the app. Sometimes this isn’t possible like picking a profile photo, so it’s just not possible.
It takes about a month to resync my library after a fresh install of MacOS. I just installed Catalina and am waiting on this process right now. It looks like it’ll be done around April.
Edit: Clarified below, but I mean just to confirm the sync state, not redownload. I have the entire local library intact, but if you change anything locally (library location, OS, etc), Photos says "Uploading 140,000 items" and takes a month to confirm the library is in sync with the server.
2. Yikes, I guess with 140k photos putting your library on an external drive before wiping and then copying the library back to your Mac would also take a long time, but it shouldn't take a full month.
2. Sorry I wasn't clear; this is what I do. The problem is that if you move the photo library at all (or even if you don't but it's a new OS installation), it doesn't trust the old sync state so it manually checks each photo. It does seem to be hashing or something since it's using very little network, but it's only processing one photo every 10 to 20 seconds. I have no idea what makes it so slow, but I've found similar reports on forums so it seems to just be the way it is.
Lightroom is inexpensive relative to other tools and everyday expenses I have. The same goes for other closed-source photography software mentioned on threads like this, to the point that I've bought some of it to experiment moving off Lightroom.
Given the propensity of photographers to splurge huge amounts on gear, and their positions on intellectual property, I don't think I'm that unusual. Perhaps within the HN crowd the philosophy is different.
I’ve moved on, I don’t do photography much anymore and if I’m going to be plowing money into something, I’d rather it be in a current hobby.