subscription free photography

Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better¹

Bit of a dramatic way to start a post about cancelling my Adobe subscriptions. Nonetheless it seems pertinent to start here; as my primary hobby it felt proper to start breaking away from this dystopian future with how the tools I use in my free time.

Subscriptions by default

There’s no shortage of online outrage around the subscription lock-in Adobe has us hooked on 🔗 FTC v. Adobe .

The reality is for almost all professionals and a large portion of causal photographers, the offerings from Adobe don’t have obvious strong competition. Lightroom is the defacto standard for any piece of photo manipulation software. The UI, while comprehensive, does still maintain an approachable feel and any beginners in the space looking for guides will almost exclusively find videos and walkthroughs of how to edit their images in Lightroom. (Naturally tied with a promotion to buy their preset pack).

As a product though, honestly, lightroom is great - but Adobe still sucks and I don’t want to pay forever more for my hobby and give absolute rights for my images to be used to train their next generative ai model (jheeze I wish my lightroom cs6 version still worked).

Reinforcing bad Habits

While certainly not the root cause Lightroom does little to discourage some poor file hygiene. The Adove photography plan comes bundled with a whole TB of cloud storage which is just more than enough for you to get pretty heavily reliant upon the service.
The result, for the most part my photos have ended up spread across several external drives, with a number of folder name conventions. However, as they have been organised into lightroom collections I’ve never had to think much about it. All culminating in a rather spotty backup strategy with files spread across drives and a number of cloud services.
This mess lead me to a simple set of requirements;

No subscriptions. File Based. Uncomplicated

A Pragmatic Workflow

At a glance

A starry night sky.

Ingest images onto an external SSD
Cull, selects and tag
1. (Don’t be afraid to delete photos!)
Edit selects locally
Sync selects folder and Capture One catalogue to a NAS

1. Ingest

Most of my photography time tends to happen away from home, so a fast SSDs is always my first port of call when taking my raws from the card.

2. Culling

I then use FastRawViewer as my choice of culling tool. This occurs as two passes. First tagging with colours. For the first time I have also started managing a _rejects folder I can permanently delete to save on space.

Green; selects worth editing and sharing
Yellow; holiday / memory photos
Blue; images of friends and family to share

On second pass photos are given stars to prioritise editing them in the limited time I have these days 😢

Why FastRawViewer

Most culls in editor are metadata led and generally separate you from the underlying file, this is fine while I’m filtering in the editor UI however it then makes any targeted backup strategy much more complex to implement.

With FRV I can just grab all tagged images and move them into a _selects folder which holds all the images I want to import. The metadata is still sync’d to and shown in most editors, but I’ve made that initial parse with the files themselves.

FRV is (as the name suggests) also noticeably quicker than any in-editor previews and I can step through images without needing to spend time waiting for them to render - a problem I encountered when testing a lot of other editing options.

3. Editing

Edits happen in Capture One, still mostly happen directly off of my external drives. I happen to have a Samsung T9 which is more than fast enough for editing RAWs in real time. This also means I’m not tied into exposing my NAS outside of its local network. Once finished I’ll tag them with a 5 star to mark them as done and exported.
I’ve seen a lot of complaints on reddit around the pricing strategy of the one off payment of £317 vs the £15.75 monthly fee (on an annual plan) - that’s only two years of use. I honestly don’t even know many professional photographers changing gear that quickly they need to guarantee the latest camera compatibility. To add to this, I’ve seen frequent sales of the perpetual license around black friday on a number of sites and I picked up my license at around 50% off.

Why Capture One

I spent a long time looking for a tool that gave me the same experience as Lightroom.

I found Capture One gave me the closest experience to Lightroom (which to reiterate I very much enjoyed as software but hated the lock in). As an apple user photomater seemed a strong contender. The ipad app is featureful which is a nice plus - it also produces sidecar files to manage edits for our file first workflow.

Unfortunately, these sidecar files get enormous with any reasonable edits. Adding a few masks to an image can easily result in 45Mb+ files which were larger than the original RAW I was editing. Some of the Open Source / Free photo editors also felt like a good fit. However they deviated too much from the workflow I had grown accustomed to with Lightroom. As solely a hobby and the idea is to take more photos not spend a year and a day relearning software.

For me Capture one; offers the most similar view to Lightroom. I actually immensely prefer the colour editing. Particularly with portraits being able to quickly select skin tone ranges is a huge win. It’s a shame there’s no subscription free mobile version of Capture One, but as a very low touch point for me normally I was happy foregoing this.

4. Sync

Finally, the biggest change to my editing world. Running my own HomeServer. I decided to pick up a UGreen DXP2800, as well as an extra ssd to install Truenas. (I did this rather than running it on the inbuilt SSD as I don’t want to lose the option to mess about with Ugreens own OS forever).
An SMB Share then acts as my image backup location. Post editing session I can run the rsync script below to backup my selected images ,as well as the Capture One Catalog file that lives in the same folder.

#!/bin/bash

SSD_DRIVE="/Volumes/T9/_selects/"
NAS="/Volumes/photos/"
rsync -avh --delete --progress "$SSD_DRIVE" "$NAS"

There’s probably some room here to explore Capture Ones concept of Sessions as well as its reference based catalogue, this would let me edit directly off the NAS. However (while I have the space on my current external drive) this is working for me fine.

More details

I was already keen on picking up an N100 based system, as a home server generally. They use very low power at idle and are chunky enough it can act as more than just a backup on my network (watch this space). BlackFriday last year also provided an opportunity to pick up this particular system at an attractive discount, cheaper than I would be able to build one myself without having something rather visually unappealing sat in my living room.

Alongside this some refurbished Seagate IronWolf drives give me 8tb of useable space with a total replication across the drives. I decided to run TrueNAS as a more mature OS. It’s ZFS based file system has a bunch of data integrity benefits and l2arc means reading the same image or video files regularly can happen much more quickly. This will definitely come in handy once I move to editing directly off the drive.

cameron / biggs