The problem is, there have always been good alternatives, but they cost a lot of money or are rented these days.
Just going to drop this here without further comment as I have never actually used it myself.
I think I tried that on Windows. It couldn’t read CR3 raw files. Neither could Darktable.
I ended up settling on Luminar. I like that it has a DAM. I take a lot of pictures and I want some place that I can keep only the photos I want. My Applephotos library is a mess since its just a stream from my phone
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Luminar AI was a mistake, seriously. It feels like a move backwards from 4 based on the features I saw in 4 vs what I got in AI. Getting a refund. Maybe going to settle on 4 but that’s already a DOA product.
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Decided to try Lightroom classic trial… hate to say it but I like it…
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I made the mistake of trying just Lightroom CC and really didn’t like it. I’m still contemplating Adobe. Not sure it’s worth the A$14.29/month though. I’m loving the editing in Luminar; it’s the organisation that’s the weak part (and the lack of detailed EXIF). I’ve tried Adobe Bridge, but to me it’s just a file browser and doesn’t show the edits to the raw files I’ve done in Luminar.
Luminar 4 was much better than AI and AI is really not that great. What kind of photo editor doesn’t show histogram by default and then there’s no shortcut key to show it so you have to open the view menu each time. I also found a comment on the forum stating that the library portion of AI isn’t really meant to be a feature and they may consider enhancing it to what 4 had. Considering 4 is EOL I don’t have faith in continuing with it sadly.
The idea of paying the money for Adobe monthly bothers me too but I kind of feel like the subscription model for software is actually the right way to go. Continuous development and always being up to date is really nice. Having access to photoshop and LrC is nice too if I want to do some serious work I guess. I’m not thrilled about it but Lr does a really good job for organization and features. You may want to try Exposure. Its library is actually quite nice.
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Yeah, AI is basically a point and click editor first without the fine controls.
As for subscription model, it depends on the value you get from it. I have Microsoft 365 business account just to lump email, storage and applications together. I’m not sure if I’d get the value out of a A$14.29 subscription for Lightroom and Photoshop. If it was, say, less than $10 forr just Lightroom, it might be easier to persuade me.
And damn, all the Creative Cloud stuff that Adobe insists on installing…
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Would you mind sharing or linking to the script you are using with exiftool? That’s intriguing to me.
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Hi @RetCon5 here is the exiftool command I use:
exiftool -d “%Y/%m/%d/%y_%m_%d_%H_%M_%S%%-c.%%e” “-Filename<DateTimeOriginal” $I
This command is part of a script that scans some source directories for photos, lets say my staging ground where I decide which photos to keep etc.
Then it feeds the photo to exiftool the $I represents the name of the original photo.
If you execute this from your target directory, where you want your photos to end up, it will create a structure like:
2020/12/01/photo-name with date time timestamp in its name
that way all photos are stored by date and the name of the photo contains the date as well if you want to move it around later, you know in a glance which date it was taken.
I hope that helps
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That’s cool, nickapos - I see it’s part of post processing for you. Thank you for sharing!
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Yeah it’s part of my pipeline.
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