The reject/star rating workflow makes it easy to get rid of out of focus/blurry/otherwise inadequate photos and flag keepers for developing. I really like nature photography, so "by subject" means I have them grouped up by species, and "by location" also covers parks, zoos, etc. In lightroom I have photos catalogued by location, by event, and by subject, and a few ad hoc collections. When you have several hundred gigs of photos, you need something better. That's almost completely useless for browsing photos, though. Cameras just give you a date/sequence number structure, which is great for the purpose of incremental backups (just add folders for the last calendar day to the backup). Photos don't have a natural band/album/song taxonomy like music, or author/series (maybe)/book like books. Might be simply because I'm neither a photographer nor a digital artist. > Nothing? To this day, I don't understand the concept of "library management" and Lightroom as a tool. To date, I don't use Calibre for dealing with my Kindle, because every time I checked, the app was 90% about library management - meanwhile, all I actually want from it is the ability to convert between ebook formats. Same is the case for music - it's fine of the player wants to provide virtual collections based on metadata, but if it tries to use them to abstract away the file system, I'll throw it out and look for a replacement. Both have some library management capabilities. But other than that?įor images, in the past I used ACDSee these days, I use IrfanView. I tolerate game launchers/library managers like Steam or Origin or whatever, but that's only because it's the blessed way to legally buy games without having to purchase physical objects (CDs, DVDs. In fact, I seem to be developing apprehension towards any kind of domain-specific "library managers". In decades of doing all kinds of ad-hoc, amateur, one-off works, the amount of photos and designs I collected is entirely manageable with default filesystem tools (explorer.exe) - or Linux shell, or Emacs, if I feel like being fancy. Nothing? To this day, I don't understand the concept of "library management" and Lightroom as a tool. (OK, I admit, 50% of the reason I upgraded, and 100% of the reason I bought the whole v1 suite in the first place, is because it's nice to do business with someone who isn't abusing their customers with subscriptions for a change.) I studied their product page extensively, and couldn't find anything else particularly compelling, at least not for my limited (and non-professional) use cases. Myself, I upgraded only Affinity Photo to v2, because I wanted to play with non-destructive workflow that's enabled by some of the new features. It would be interesting to learn what their current breakdown of is. There are some new features and a host of UI and performance improvements, but otherwise, the software is substantially the same as version 1. Few months ago, they released version 2 of their software suite.
![Manycam standalone old version Manycam standalone old version](https://europe1.discourse-cdn.com/katalon/original/3X/9/a/9ad7e78e756c2e8b292bbc20377c3f50410b41fa.png)
They produce graphics software competing directly with Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, and their core differentiator is that they don't do subscriptions - you pay up front, and get a regular, perpetual license in return.
![Manycam standalone old version Manycam standalone old version](https://img.informer.com/pe/manycam-v8.1-main-window-display.png)
Perhaps a good case study here is/will be Affinity. If you’re lucky, you may have snagged a lifetime license the company offered early in its life, which it then stopped offering once it started getting successful, so it continues letting you use the lifetime license because the owners of such licenses are few enough that any marginal revenue they may earn by pulling the above tricks is not worth the reputational damage. When companies that have offered lifetime licenses don’t fail, they inevitably kill the lifetime part of the license by pulling different tricks like, creating a cloud version which now becomes their future version, while the desktop version is no longer maintained, or rebranding the same app as a new app where actual development continues while the old app gets minimal updates at most, or not updating the app with the lifetime license so it works on modern OSes and platforms. The only time a lifetime license will actually be honored as such is of the company’s product fails and it’s no longer around as a company, so it allows you to continue using the current version as is.