Alternatives to Lightroom

What's a good alternative to PS Lightroom? I cancelled my Abobe subscription because the cost was too much and the only thing I wanted was Lightroom for organising my 1000s of family photos and quick edits for printing.
What's a good alternative to Lightroom that won't be so spendy?

Capture One

I'm looking at Luminar Ai, when I get a computer that can run it.

digiKam is great for cataloguing and rating etc. and is free

Affinity is good for editing and cheap
Darktable, RawTherapee are good and free

That was one on my radar as well, and cheaper than lightroom. @greentricky thanks for the heads-up, will look tonight

Affinity just gone on sale
https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/

I've been using dartable for a few years now - I find it really good but my competencies are quite basic and there is a lot to learn! I've not used anything else apart from digiKam though, so can't say how it compares to proprietary (e.g. adobe) products.

Buy Photo Mechanic for organising. It's the best. So fast and easy to use.

What ben has said, I use Photo mechanic to organise, tag selections, put on data and take the raw file from it to photo shop for editing. Im also on a old version of PS too!

I think the K fell off @d0cA's Darktable (ie. not dartable). It's excellent.

Oh yes, well spotted. Here's the website: https://www.darktable.org

Finally got around to purchasing Luminar Neo (the latest version, an upgrade over Luminar AI, which superseded Luminar 4)

Seems they have adopted a subscription service, as well as a perpetual license, with more "bonus" items with the subs method.

I downloaded the free trial, which immediately popped up with a "24hr only discount" for 2 for the price of 1 licenses, but the price was considerably lower than the lifetime one (£47 vs £89)

So if anyone is tempted, click the 'Free Download' button, which gives you a week to play around, plus you might get the same discount I did.

Had fun messing about with the Sky replacement function, can make dull backgrounds a bit more dramatic, or quite OTT.

How is the archiving and sorting folders out with Luminar? Is it similar to Lightroom? This is the thing I missed the most from Lightroom.

Need some help. My very old macbook is on it lasts legs; it’s becoming unusable.

All my photos are on iPhoto. Most of them are sorted into folders by month, but I’ve got a load that still need sorting and many will need deleting.

I feel like one of those mad hoarders you see on bad tv programmes; I’m totally overwhelmed by the task of sorting them out and it’s got to the point where I’ve stopped taking photos.

I’m going to get a new macbook. What’s the best way to sort my photos out and store them? Somehow move them to onto the new laptop then use one of these programmes mentioned above to organise them?

Where are people storing their pics? On computer and a hard drive, or also online???

Sorry for basic questions. I’ve never really bothered editing photos other than real basic stuff in iPhoto.

i store on a hard drive that I can carry around with me, plus back-up to a storage computer at home.

For sorting, I rename (using exiftool for linux - but there's almost certainly similar for other operating systems) to YYYMMDD_HHMMSS_origfilename like so: exiftool -d %Y%m%d_%H%M%S%%f.%%e "-filename<CreateDate" .

This gives me, for example, 20220925_010435ASM_4002.NEF

It helps me as I know exactly when I took the photo, plus I have the original reference from the camera (in case I edited first/called it something else previously). I then do my editing (using darktable, which is free but highly functional) and often when I export I renamed slightly so it's got the 'title' preceding the filename. For instance, my file in this week's photo challenge was called stopandbuyme_20220925_001628ASM_3987_02.png - title, then the filename as per above, then _02 as it was the second (actually third) edit of the photo that I'd tried.

Okay thanks for this. I need to sort out my storage situation promptly. Like the idea of having everything on one laptop but assume will take up too much space. Won’t have a spare so I guess will use two hard disks. Nobody use online storage?

So after using Lightroom for a few years but quite frankly not getting much use out of it I've decided to drop it - I don't enjoy editing, I'm no pro and I really like what my Fuji camera does to images anyway.

I've now started editing photos with the Fuji X raw software via the actual camera, which I find works well (if a bit slower maybe), but while this is great in terms of picture quality, it doesn't offer other basic functions like cropping/straightening and maybe the odd simple heal brush/clone stamp.

Is there a very simple software that will offer that at either a low price or free, and possibly quite simple and light in use? I know something like gimp can do that and lots more, but since I wouldn't need the whole of what it does I'd rather stick to something a little simpler and probably quicker to use in the end.

I don't. My thinking is that a large collection will probably take a while to transfer, so think about how often you might need to do that. Of course, single images will be (much) quicker. Otherwise, there's also things like flickr etc, but I don't have any experience with any of that.

I'd still recommend darktable - it's free and has loads of modules, but that doesn't mean you have to use them all. I started with just cropping occasionally, then with playing with contrast/brightness/saturation, and now I'm messing around with white balance. I'm no pro either, just a happy amateur.

Alternatively, just do a little search online, there are quite a number of other options, quite a few with GUIs and many are pretty basic while still being functional (and cross platform).

Capture one express? Is free, has all those basic functions and the Fujifilm version lets you load up the film sims if you shoot raw. Pretty sure you can customise the window to only display the tools you want to use if you want to keep it simple.

Another vote for Capture one express. Just discovered this whilst deliberating over signing up for Lightroom again. It's free for Fuji and Sony cameras (all cameras?), very impressed so far. All the basic functions work really well, it's great for raw and it looks like it does a pretty decent job of cataloguing. It doesn't appear to have masking but that's probably asking a bit much.

I'm also checking out darktable, the gui put me off initially for some reason, but I need to get past that and spend some time with it.

I like irfanview for simple photo editing. Only 5MB does everything I need. & its free.

Why not getting an older version of LR?

I tried nearly everything and just kept going back to LR. Just get a regular (older) version without all the cloud and subscription-bs.

Edit: if your camera still supports it: Aperture (and you got a mac).
Edit2: in order getting Aperture to run on a "modern" machine you'll need this tool: https://github.com/cormiertyshawn895/Retroactive

What version would you suggest?

It would be Lightroom 5 or 6.

But first check the documentation: you need to know if your camera is supported.