Goodbye Lightroom

It’s funny how specific tools become ubiquitous and an almost unquestionable act.
I’ve been using Lightroom as my default pipeline to store, organize and color correct all of the photos that I’ve been taking for the past 20 years.

Photography (while an absolute amateur) is something that I enjoy. Now with more white hair than I’d like to admit the act of going through those high quality RAW files is akin to find ”actual” physical photos.

Slowly seduced by the promise of the ever present, resilient and fast cloud I was one of those who thought:

If I can use this tool in my iPad and get a nice workflow what would be the problem?

Oh sweet summer child if you knew. If you knew the treacherous path that some quarter profits goals would do to your sanity.

Then I received this email:

We hope you are enjoying the apps and services in your Lightroom plan with 1TB subscription. We want to share an important update about your subscription.

The price of the Lightroom plan with 1TB annual, billed monthly plan is changing from US$ 9,99/month to US$ 11,99/month (including applicable Tax/VAT) on your next renewal date.

Yeah, nope. That's it.

When starting this journey of cloud detoxification I came across https://numericcitizen.me/adobe-lightroom-2016-2024-rip-how-to-migrate-from-adobe-lightroom-to-photomator/ which ease a lot of my questions about the subject.

Synology NAS

Playing around with servers, virtualization and hardware is something that I enjoy a lot. I do have my small cluster of Proxmox instances but also not having to worry about configuration while keeping access to terabytes of data feels great.

I got a server that I used mostly as archival and access to the movies that I want to keep at hand without asking the streaming service landlords for approval.

Downloading originals + edits

Originally I tried many ways while using the Lightroom application to get some sort of Export without any luck. My best plan was to download all of my albums and then dig through wherever the app put them.

Fortunately was a lot simpler than I was expecting since there's an official Lightroom Downloader App.

I was surprised that Adobe has an actual page about it but of course that is not linked anywhere in the app.

Synology Photos

The progress web apps have made in the past years is quite incredible. Once a wild idea but today the fact that the UI/UX feels natural without compromising performance (too much) eases things.

Joy of photography

Getting back control of not only my memories but also the ways I like to express had a bigger effect than I was expecting. Being able to go through years of my life without depending on the at best benevolent dictators and at worst financial kidnapers systems brings me joy.

At some point I was very concerned with gear but now I settled pretty happily with:

iPhone 16 Pro
Fuji XT20
Fuji X100T

A special shoutout to mood.camera because it gave me back the true enjoyment of taking photos with my iPhone. Long gone are the overly sharp artificial photos from the regular camera replaced by ones with a lot more personality.