It’s total madness, isn’t it. Long time user, from 1-5, then everything fell apart with CC, subscriptions and the clusterfuck of shite installed on my Mac.
I'm in the same boat. A very long time user and I really liked everything about it. When they started pulling that subscription shit with tons of crapware I had enough. Cancelling subscription (even a short one) was also a terrible (I would even call it criminal) experience. Tried couple of alternatives, and frankly I don't like them. They are either slow, got abandoned in a year or have unintuitive workflows.
I would even pay $500 for a LR Classic without all of their other crapware, but they just like that too much to take my money.
I found a loophole - check my older comments - to let me get out of their system, but they may have closed it. I bought Affinity for a laugh but switched to Capture One for better skin tones, Photo Mechanic Plus for better management. Both those have gone to the terrible subscription model but I’m just going to freeze my Mac‘s OS where it is and have a reliable machine for this.
I bought the Affinity Suite during Black Friday, just to have some decent software on mac to do some editing. I'm far from a professional though and I have no idea how good their software actually is.
Pixelmator/Photomator is an interesting alternative with robust software for both Mac and iPad. I’m a bit too fond of Photoshop layers right now, but I’m tempted to switch.
Confronted with the same sort of problem, I ended up with Capture One and couldn't be happier. There are other options out there, which you should definitely explore.
> then everything fell apart with CC, subscriptions and the clusterfuck of shite installed on my Mac
except it also made Adobe more valuable than it ever was before and pretty much jump-started the ARR / SaaS valuation model that defines Tech today, so it's not ever going away
I tried the subscription for Lightroom CC and left my computer on at night to sync my meager 50-100GB to their cloud clusterfuck. Trial period ended after 2 weeks and the sync hadn’t finished – and no it wasn’t an issue with my bandwidth.
This part is so true. Adobe under-the-hood SWE feels so shoddy. It feels as if their products, although delivering the good, is strung up by different patchworks. And it spawns files & folders all over your system
Same, I miss the ownership of my photos and photographic workflows from the older lightroom days. It's sad that the industry rolled over to accept this and it trickled to the consumers.
