Replacing Lightroom

We've been using Adobe Lightroom for the last 12 years to manage our family pictures. I have enjoyed using it, but lately am getting more and more annoyed with Adobe's practices. First there was the push to the cloud with the CC-series of their products. And although you can still run Lightroom "Classic", I can't shake the feeling that Adobe isn't going to stop pulling me to their Cloud. Next was the uproar of Adobe using my photo's to train their AI. And although this turned out to be false, here again, I feel like they secretly would want to. Then there's the absurd cancellation fees story. And finally, €18/month isn't really expensive, but I'm not getting €18 worth of value out of it. We manage our holiday pictures, a couple of times a year; we're not doing wedding photography 5 times a week. So I set out to look for an alternative, starting with with the hard part: figuring out what we actually want and need.

One of the nice things about Lightroom, is that it integrates the "management" and the "editing" function into one tool, letting you seamlessly switch between developing and searching. And although there are cases where quickly switching between these two is useful, for example when creating a physical photo-album, most of the time I'm in one mode exclusively. At the end of an event, I usually import the media and groom them. This includes selecting the best picture from a burst, cropping down, adjusting the exposure. When we have lots of pictures, e.g. from a longer holiday, I use the 1–5 stars to extract the highlights without making our family sit through a 350-picture slide-show.

One thing that Lightroom (Classic) lacking in, was accessibility of the library. Since it's a stand alone desktop app, you can only access your pictures on that single machine. And while this was perfectly acceptable in 2012, nowadays, I would like to access my complete photo library from my smartphone while on the go, without actually having to have all pictures on my phone. Privacy and control are very important to me, so I don't want to put my pictures in some cloud. But I do want to have my pictures exposed via a web-interface and optionally an app. This comes with the security risk that I have to secure this web access myself, but I believe I have the needed expertise to do so.

Historically, our family pictures are stored as files in a directory tree, one directory per event, organized by year/month. Really old events have only JPEGs. Around 2012 we got a DSLR, so we switched to using RAW-files. Since we've been using Lightroom, we usually didn't bother exporting JPEGs, and just kept working with the RAW files. Looking back, this may not be the best way to do things: all edits we've made (crops, exposure adjustments, ...) as well as the selections (stacks, stars) are stored by Lightroom and are not (easily) transferable to whatever software we're migrating to. So I intend to change our workflow to export JPEGs from every event and use these instead, while keeping the RAW files tucked a level deeper.

The library management software I'm looking for should:

• Be self-hosted
• Have a web-interface to view photos & movies.
• Support the existing library of pictures, as-is, on disk, preferably read-only. This means support for JPEG/JFIF, HEIC/HEIF and Canon CR2 and CR3 raw files, as well as MPEG-TS and MP4 video's
• Be able to handle a significant library size. We currently have over 160k media items, and well over 2TB in data
• Have a faceted search tool to find pictures
• AI and/or Machine Learning for face detection, recognition and grouping

Nice to haves are:

• Ability to share/export an album
• Have some form of user management, with the ability to share media between users
• AI and/or Machine Learning to extract descriptive metadata of a picture to enable "Smart search"
• The ability to show pictures on a map, based on the embedded geotagging. Bonus points if it can handle the format that Lightroom uses to put geotags in XMPs and JPEGs

For the editing part, I don't think we're power users. What we need is:

• Compatibility with our DSLRs (Canon)
• Lossless editing. This will probably be software-specific
• Cropping & rotating
• Exposure, contrast and white balance adjustment; Ideally picture-wide as well as localized

Others are nice to have, but not really hard requirements:

• Minor touch-ups, mostly spot removal
• Lens correction, vignetting correction
• HDR
• Panorama stitching

The contenders

For the library management I tried both PhotoPrism and Immich. I tried to import my library and tried to do some simulated activities such as find a particular photo in the library, and show an album to an (imagined) family member. And although PhotoPrism didn't lack in any way, I liked Immich better. I'm only using the External Library mode for now to access my historic photos. There's also Nextcloud Memories that seems similar, but I haven't tried that yet. Check out Meichthys's comparison for a full feature comparison.

For editing, I'm currently trying Luminar Neo and DarkTable.