For some reason I’ve been thinking about installing Lightroom again. Of course earlier this year I decided that I was only going to use Capture One and I completely uninstalled everything from Adobe.
I prefer Capture One “sessions” to its catalogs because cataloging in C1 has always felt janky and slow to me. Sessions are great at the point of ingest and initial edits, but become cumbersome later when just wanting to peruse my library.
Lightroom (new Desktop, not Classic) is better at catalogs. It also creates automatic People albums and groups things nicely by date, etc. It feels faster and is much simpler than C1. They recently added the ability to edit local files and only sending selected images to their cloud library. This is super nice.
In a fit of either boredom or frustration I subscribed to and re-installed Lightroom. It’s very nice, and one of the presets I use for people photos is still my favorite and I haven’t been able to recreate it in C1.
But, Lightroom is not Capture One. Its UI is not at all customizable, its export options are limited, tethering isn’t a thing, there are no layers, the “Edit with…” menu only allows Photoshop, etc. etc. Besides, I get images I prefer, faster with C1 than with anything I’ve used.
What about the catalog problem, then? The thing I get weary of in C1 is the difficulty of working with the archives using sessions, so I’ve decided to give C1 catalogs another try.
After one hour, I’ve uninstalled Lightroom again. A new record. That was close!
But here’s something to think about. C1 just layed off a bunch of staff and their customer practices and messaging are horrible. Plus, they seem to be more and more focused on professional photographers, one of which I am not. So basically I may be forced to change my mind again later.