[benjimouse]

This is one I'd consider paying the $99 lifetime price for:

- Pixelmator cost me peanuts and I'm still using it ~15 years after buying it. I even purchased PM Pro because I felt guilty I'd gotten so much benefit of the original for so little.

- I gave up Lightroom because... adobe.

- Capture One:

  = is barely anything but rental software at this point. "Lifetime" price is ridiculous.
  
  = I'm tired of having to relearn a seemingly completely rebuilt UI every time I upgrade.
  
  = Catalog system makes it practically impossible organize your photos outside of the app. (all my raws up till I switched to C1 are in year/month/day folders, afterwards it's single folder blobs dated roughly at the time I ran out of diskspace and had to purge it to offline storage). The whole paradigm of how it manages photos sucks imo.

As long as it can read my Sony A1 raws and has reasonable shadow recovery I'm in.

[runlevel1]

And they keep delivering new features to Pixelmator. More so than a lot of subscription-based products. It's one hell of a value.

[stephen_g]

I managed to get a Capture One 22 license for half price (when I was quitting Adobe), I did the trial and the let it expire - I actually was just going to buy it but forgot. Then I just got an email like "Hey, would half price be enough incentive?" and I was like, "Sure".

It looks like things have changed somewhat with the perpetual licensing since then, but the version I have does what I want for the cameras I use and supports Apple Silicon, so I hope to keep using this version for the next four or five years so without paying any more...

But good to have alternatives, I'll definitely look at this software in a few years if something happens like incompatibility with a future version of macOS or something.

[benjimouse]

Well it's importing images from a card into the apple photos catalogue, and randomly scattering them thru the folders in it's database. That's kinda useless for anyone wanting to manage literally terabytes of images.

Otherwise it's really slick. Frustrating.

[sbuk]

Have a look at RAW Power by Gentlemen Coders (https://www.gentlemencoders.com/). The team consists of former Aperture engineers, so it's similar. Costs a reasonable $40. You can use either Photos libraries or manage the files yourself. Overall, I've been really pleased with it.