I have been taking digital photos since 2000 - initially on Canon PowerShot S10 pocket camera, later various larger DSLRs, and (mostly) nowadays also using camera phones.
The software to deal with the pictures has never been that great though.
Ancient history (2000-2005)
I vaguely remember that in 2000-2005 I mostly dumped the .jpg files to various places. It is a wonder that I never managed to lose any significant photos that I cared about, as at the time I was not particularly meticulous about backups.
Pixmantec’s RawShooter Pro (2006-2007)
I think it was around 2005 that I bought my first DSLR - Canon EOS 350D. I got keen about raw pictures soon after, and then found RawShooter Pro to convert the pictures. While I was well intentioned in my first baby steps with raw photo files, in hindsight I am not sure if my after-action editing of the pictures was actually an improvement or not. (They’re awfully dark - while I could fix them, I haven’t found the motivation for it yet).
This didn’t last very long, though, as Adobe bought Pixmantec in end of 2006 and stopped its development. The code wound up in Adobe Lightroom later.
kuvat (2006-2008)
I wrote my own photo management program around this time. It was written in C++ using Qt (I think I used it initially on Linux, and later on on Mac). It borrowed some design ideas from historic iTunes (which I have since also copied to my own accounting program, e.g. multi-pane selection logic).
I am not big fan of maintaining my own software if there’s either open source software to be had, or commercial software that I can just buy.. so, this iteration did not last long.
Adobe Lightroom (2008+)
Originally I was amazed by the Adobe Lightroom (I think I started using at 1.0 or some beta). It was pretty good for managing pictures, also handling all raw formats I cared about, and it did exactly what I wanted. I bought upgrade license every year or two, for awhile..
It also received feature upgrades, such as panorama making and HDR support over time.
Subscription snake in the garden (2014)
Unfortunately eventually its development got slower and slower, and after 2014 the mobile stuff showed up - behind subscription, and the original Lightroom was renamed ‘Classic’ in 2019 and mostly never developed since. The new Lightroom is cloud-centric, and much worse.
I paid the subscription to use Lightroom Classic for a decade, mostly because it was easy way to sync my photos between laptop and my mobile devices.
The straw that broke camel’s back
I don’t think the subscription was particularly expensive as such, but as Lightroom Classic did not seem to get much maintenance over time (e.g. the cloud sync broke couple of times per year, leading to me needing to re up/download data for almost a day as it did format conversion during it and their servers were not the fastest either it seems), so I got tired of paying for software that did not work. So around christmas 2025 I simply chose not to pay for it anymore, after being subscriber about ten years.
Immich (2025+)
I have looked at the Immich project almost from its inception. It seems to be aimed at more casual photographers than what I was at the time, or even still am.
There are three reasons why I am not considering going all in on in yet.
Missing part 1: Star rating handling
For me, the main pain point is star rating system: I don’t like 3-state
- delete (bad)
- ok (do nothing)
- heart/favourite
system that most of the consumer photo apps like Immich use - I prefer to find good/excellent pictures, perhaps keep most of the bad ones too, but seldom visit them.
While Immich has started recently supporting star ratings, they’re hidden in info panel and not that visible overall. This is basically something I cannot see myself getting over, as the whole point of star ratings is that you can set them (and see them) as easily as the (to me) silly ‘heart’ for favourite photos there is now.
Missing part 2: Smart folders
Another thing it is lacking is smart folders. In Lightroom I have set of smart folders which basically guide me through workflow of handling a set of pictures - no such thing is available in Immich yet.
There are some third-party solutions for it.
Missing part 3: Source fidelity
Immich on mobile just grabs whatever the result of latest e.g. Photos edit is, and unfortunately keeps the old versions around as duplicates if there have been multiple edits. Also the files are not the original format or fidelity, but instead whatever is the result of the current processing pipeline settings in Photos. This is not particularly good for my ‘keep original as much as possible’ mindset.
Tooling attempt to fix my Lightroom <> Immich syncing
I actually started working on Lightroom to Immich sync tooling before figuring out that I don’t really want to use Immich in the long term. So kuvakirnu was born (fancy marketing image by ChatGPT):
Unfortunately, I do not think this will have legs in the long term, as I am not that big fan of the (free) Lightroom Classic that I am using (it cannot be used for editing but the album management is still available), and Immich is lacking as a viewer, so I’m having worst of both worlds.
Future = more AI software
I think I will just write new version of kuvat, for iOS - making it be basically something along the lines of Aperture as far as media management is concerned, and its own sync mechanism (as PhotoKit and therefore Photos’ iCloud functionality does not really support extra metadata I want to store, such as star ratings).
I have been thinking about what I want to do with my pictures for years - and now with LLMs, I think I finally can. We shall see when that ships, though.
I will leave raw editing out of scope, but luckily both Photos app as well as whatever open source tooling I will use going forward can convert them to something I can present easily enough.