I know this is my first post, I have been a lurker for a long time.
I am actively trying to get away from Lightroom, I have bought every version (eventually) but on my own schedule rather than theirs, nothing in this new version is relevant to me, all my Canon camera bodies are fairly old apart from the 7Dmkii and my lenses are all last generation (at least since the 70-200 f4 update
) I get nothing from the subscription currently, version 6 was ok but I would have liked to have it on more than two laptops, there is only me and I can only use one at a time but I have many laptops and it would have been nice to have it on more than two.
The main problem in trying to escape their clutches is the catalogue media management partly because it is good, I think they use SQLite as the database and a very fine database that is however I am going to use SQL Server Express and I think it will be quicker, I've already written a scanner and database schema which will automatically de-duplicate or rather show me duplicates if they exist, the scanner decomposes a file system path into its fundamental elements, I use it in other commercial applications but really want to use it for my photography as well.
My intention is to initially create a replacement for Lightroom's catalogues including all the metadata management, some of that might be hard but I'm only going to support CR2 files to start with, probably JPG and TIFF as well but no other manufacturer's proprietary formats, I'm old still working and I only have so much time on my hands
It might never happen, I am getting old but I am also getting angry
I looked at Luminar and I do quite like it, I found it can be launched from the command line with a filename parameter however it is a bit stupid about where it writes the .lmnr file when you save, so if I manage to build an asset manger I hope to be able to launch various editors and Luminar would be one possible candidate, the problem these days is that all of these external editors are quite heavy processes to launch, some more so than others.
If I do this it will be Windows only at least to start with, Canon and common file formats only, it won't be commercial and it won't be on an ad stuffed website, but as I said might never happen, I've started a lot of projects over the years that I never finished
Just angry at Adobe taking away the perpetual licence with version 7