Cameras and Photography Explained

LEDE ON

Sometimes a week goes by without any interesting or significant camera product announcements, but in which there turned out to be lots of photography-adjacent news. Last week was one of those weeks. Even Apple is now actively reporting supply chain constraints and pricing impacts for future products. Smaller players—which includes all of the camera makers—will have bigger issues. Without further ado:

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Commentary

Sony Makes Buyout Offer for Tamron

I was just about to write a longer article about consolidation when Tamron’s acknowledgement that Sony had made a buyout offer for Tamron hit the news wires. 

This appears to be related to the fact that Tamron recently found itself the target of an aggressive overseas investment firm (Effissimo Capital Management, based in Singapore), which has now managed to gobble up over 17% of Tamron’s stock. It’s a long, complex story, but Japanese companies generally regroup when under foreign ownership attack. Sony, which has the second biggest ownership stake in Tamron, likely made its US$1.2 billion buyout offer for Tamron partly to keep Tamron Japanese. It doesn’t hurt that Tamron is an integral part of the E-mount success, and that Tamron’s second biggest relationship is with Nikon, who is a coopetitor with Sony (i.e. Nikon and Sony have both a cooperative and competitive relationship that dates back to the previous century). 

Be careful about what you infer (or what you believe from other sites’ speculations). This is probably mostly about Big Money Seeking Bigger Money. Effissimo currently stands to make a huge profit from any Sony-buys-Tamron deal. Indeed, the fact that an investment firm made that kind of investment in the first place is that they understood Tamron’s stock to be undervalued, and they would be agitating for anything that makes the stock value go up. And up it has gone. After sitting just below the 1100 yen mark for most of the past year, it now is at 1434 yen (though that’s somewhat above Sony’s offer). 

For it’s part, Tamron has issued a statement indicating that they are contemplating Sony’s takeover bid. In essence, that short press release says that Tamron has established a committee to consider options at increasing corporate value. In other words, they’ll consider Sony’s offer, but they’ll explore other ways of making their stock more valuable, as well.

More than one site has written that Sony would grow their investment value by taking over Tamron, but I’m not so sure about that. The only way Tamron’s value to Sony would grow as a subdivision would be that there’s continued expansion of third-party offerings in other mounts. If this is just about combining the existing Sony and Tamron lens lines to make an uber lens lineup while getting rid of the offerings for competitive mounts, that has failure written all over it.

Tamron currently has 25 lenses, and Sony has 79. No mount has ever had over 100 current lenses offered by its maker, even back when the volume of interchangeable lens cameras selling each year was well more than double what it is today. There was a reason why lens lineups tended to be somewhere in the 60-70 range from each maker. As you move beyond that, you essentially start diluting your efforts because you lower individual lens volumes, particularly when you have as much overlap as the Sony/Tamron lines would produce.

Which brings me to consolidation. What I was going to write is this: the current and projected dedicated camera market can’t sustain the number of players currently producing products. 6m units (last year was 6.3m mirrorless units) with one competitor attempting to control 50% of that (Canon), makes for very low volumes for the smaller players. Canon and Sony also have their professional video sides which expand their mounts some. But Fujifilm, Nikon, OMDS, and Panasonic are all struggling to get to a truly sustainable mount volume (which I’d judge to be something on the order of 1.5m units).

So add things up. Let’s assume: Canon 50%, Sony 35%. In even a 7m unit volume, that leaves only 1m units for the remaining players. It’s the old Reis & Trout “third largest competitor in a market struggles to remain profitable” problem. What tends to happen is marginal players either go away, consolidate, or create a new product category. You may remember that from the late film SLR days or the late DSLR days. Well guess what, we’re back to it again: not enough volume for the number of players in the game. (But see final comment in article, below.)

Moreover, it doesn’t help that the Chinese are trying to elbow their way to the table. Initially through lenses, but it’s only a matter of time before they’ll try cameras, too. That will only increase the consolidation pressure, as the Japanese companies would rather consolidate in Japan than be acquired by foreigners or go away entirely. Which leaves us with really only four possible consolidations at the camera level:

• Fujifilm and Nikon — ironically, the first non-Kodak digital interchangeable lens cameras were a cooperative effort between these two companies. But the problem here is this: while the Nikon RED acquisition would be a really nice fit for Fujifilm, having APS-C, full frame, and medium format offerings would be a marketing nightmare.
• Nikon and Panasonic — Panasonic’s ego on the professional video side is the problem here. In my opinion, RED is now a more viable way forward than Panasonic’s weird multiple-mount pro efforts. But I don’t see Panasonic’s professional video side being able to admit that, let alone go alone with it. 
• OMDS and Panasonic — this assumes, of course, that m4/3 remains viable, which I’m not sure it is. m4/3 already has become niche, and it’s a small niche to start with. I don’t see this consolidation possibility as being meaningful in any way. It likely wouldn’t solve the problem of too little volume.
• Sony and Nikon — The level of cooperation between these two companies is much more than people realize, though both sides now have big egos on the high-end camera and pro video side. I think for this sort of consolidation to be possible, Nikon would have to essentially fail at multiple levels and require a savior. 

Will any of those happen? I’d place the odds fairly low, even though history and MBA wisdom says it should happen. While some may argue that the auto industry manages to have many players, vehicles are also much more expensive devices with far higher unit volumes and plenty of exploitable niches. The smaller the overall market and the lower the cost of the product, the more that the market can’t sustain many profitable players.

Without consolidation, there’s a high possibility that more than one of the smaller players becomes irrelevant in digital cameras. In order of that happening, it would go OMDS first (some might argue it’s already there), Panasonic second, Fujifilm third, and Nikon fourth. Why not the inverse between the last two? Because digital camera sales are a small part of Fujifilm, while they’re almost a majority at Nikon. Nikon basically has to make cameras work, or it is not a viable business overall.

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News

Nikon Lost Another Patent 

Hot on the heels of losing the RED patent in Japan, Nikon has lost another one.

It’s taken awhile to for the information to get out of China, but in mid-July the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) declared one of Nikon’s key Z-mount patents to be invalid, due to the lack of inventiveness. The particular patent in question, 202010127062.4, is basically the mechanical design patent for the Z-mount, which is the one that defines the four fins that are used to align and lock in the lens in place as you twist it in the mount, as well as the position of the electronic contacts. As far as I can tell, this patent does not apply to the communications used on the pins, which is really the way a lens becomes fully compatible with a camera. 

What other sites aren’t disclosing (or just plain getting wrong) is that the invalid patent ruling comes from Viltrox’s court filing in December 2025, not from Nikon’s suit against Viltrox in February 2026. The claims that “Nikon lost its suit against Viltrox” don’t seem to be supported by the documents currently circulating. What is known is that the CNIPA has declared one of Nikon’s patents as invalid, and that this is the patent contested by Viltrox in December of last year. Losing that patent is likely to impact the case Nikon brought against Viltrox, but there’s no news on that yet.

I’m still unclear as to what Nikon’s intention was in bringing suit against Viltrox in February, and whether the full scope of the original suit has even been fully decided. I suspect, but can’t prove, that this isn’t at all about lenses. Viltrox has, for instance, briefly shown a prototype of a camera, though I believe that was an m4/3 mount camera. But the recent Viltrox 26mm f/2.8 lens suggests another possibility: that Viltrox and Nikon worked together on a lens design, and someone in Nikon upper management felt that relationship got away from them. 

One thing that doesn’t get mentioned often enough is that many companies are suppliers to other companies, and this leads to all sorts of strange relationships. For instance, Nikon is a supplier of glass to many companies outside of their own NIKKOR efforts. I’m not sure if that includes Viltrox, but I know of four other lens makers that acquire glass from Nikon.

But the reality is that the whole patent system—indeed most intellectual property systems—has spiralled well out of control. What I learned about what you can and can’t patent in my years in Silicon Valley seems to have been stood on end, and people are getting patents for things that aren’t novel, non-obvious, or useful, and even for things that don’t meet the basic statuatory requirements. “Prior Art” is now being interpreted by some as “don’t do it exactly the same, just change something small and not meaningful.”  Virtually all lens mounts these days are of the bayonet type and have electrical contacts, so unless size and positioning of those are novel in some meaningful way, I don’t see how a patent for them can stand up in court examination. 

Thus, the result that a Nikon design patent is currently held invalid—which Nikon can appeal—isn’t particularly surprising. If I were adjudicating such a case, I’d be asking pointed questions about what made Nikon's claims unique inventions as opposed to mere modifications of something (bayonet mount) that’s been a design standard for decades.

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Comment

We’re All Shook Up

A 6.8 magnitude earthquake was registered in the Kumamoto prefecture in Japan last week. While that probably doesn’t immediately suggest a connection to the camera market to you, unfortunately, there’s a very significant connection: image sensors and filtration layers. Both Sony Semiconductor (image sensors) and Fujifilm (filtration) had to close their plants after the quake in order to evaluate potential damage.

The reason that this is a comment and not news is that, other than the initial plant shutdowns, we don’t yet know exactly what products might be impacted, nor how long the shutdown might continue. Moreover, the larger image sensors for dedicated cameras tend to get built in batches, so we don’t know specifically which sensors might have been on the fabs at the time of the quake. Sony Semiconductor regards that type of information as proprietary and to my knowledge has never publicly disclosed individual sensor supply issues.

So this story is one for which we won’t really know any details, though we may eventually see some products get postponed or deliveries delayed. 

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Comment

Sorry, No Rebate for You

Tucked away in Canon’s recent 2nd quarter financial results was the point that one of the ways that the quarter was so profitable for Canon is that they got significant tariff rebates (Apple also reported significant tariff rebates, heck, pretty much every company has been doing so). Specifically, 58b yen (US$361m). Did you get any of that money? No.

What’s happening is that most every company is retaining tariff rebates as a way to make their bottom line look better. A few, including Canon, are implying that they’ll use the money retained to offer customers future discounts. However, what they fail to disclose is that they raised their list prices, so those discounts very well may still turn out to make the product more expensive than it was before the tariff situation started in the first place. If you raised prices 15% to cover tariffs, but then discount 10% implying that you’re just giving back rebate money—Canon speak: “we have incorporated promotional activities to expand sales”—you’re effectively still inflating costs to consumers. 

Coupled with the increases in semiconductor and memory costs that the rapid AI expansion is generating, cameras simply sell for more money now than they used to. So far, at least here in the US, consumer spending is still increasing, though some (maybe all) of that increase is coming from higher prices. 

Cameras and photography gear fall under what is called discretionary spending. You don’t require those things to live, as you do for housing, food, transportation, healthcare, and utilities. As inflation and interest rates start eating into your income, you basically have three choices: (1) use savings, (2) borrow more, or (3) lower your discretionary spending. So far, the data says that here in the US people are doing #1 and #2, though they do seem to also have cut back on travel. But neither of those first two choices are sustainable for individuals, so eventually #3 becomes the only remaining method to them. 

CIPA data shows that full frame mirrorless, for instance, is taking a nose dive in shipments to the US recently. Some of that is that there haven’t been (m)any new releases in that category to goose sales, but you also have to wonder how much of that is weakness in discretionary spending starting to show up, too. The lower cost categories (compacts, and crop-sensor mirrorless) are doing better. 

New tariffs on tap aren’t going to help any, either. The potential for more price increases is already present, but the likelihood you’ll ever see a tariff rebate isn’t on the horizon at all.  

LEDE ON

You probably thought I was done writing about tariffs. Sure, the courts overturned the Section 122 tariffs and companies (but not you) have started getting rebates, but the Trump Administration has since imposed additional tariffs under Section 301. Section 122 tariffs were 10% to all countries with a trade deficit to the US, while Section 301 tariffs are 12.5% to 60 countries using forced labor (many dispute this). 

However, there’s now a Trump Playbook in effect at retail. The key play: before tariffs take effect increase your imports so that you have adequate inventory for the foreseeable future and courts get involved again. The idiocy of the recent US trade policies are thus revealed in this latest round: retailers basically are increasing the trade deficits in their sectors short term, which, of course, supposedly someone in DC wanted decreased instead. Can you say “own goal”?

Still, in case you haven’t noticed, the camera companies took the last tariff opportunity to increase their list pricing for many items. As a company, you don’t get many chances to raise pricing and not be the entity that customers complain about. The new higher pricing coupled with tariff rebates from last round have allowed what looks like big discounts. For example, a Nikon Z8 now lists at US$4300 and currently features a US$800 discount.  Yet when it came out it was US$4000, thus today’s discounts are really a net of US$500. 

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Commentary

Blah

One question I see more and more people asking with each new camera introduction is “what are we really gaining?” The days of clear feature or body form gains seem to be mostly over for the moment (at least out of Japan). Yes, more pixels, additional dynamic range, faster frame rates, and better focus performance is pretty much what every press release seems to say these days. But what is the tangible use gained from these? 

Most of it seems to be what I call “moving the margins.” For example, virtually all current cameras can record the full dynamic range of 95% of scenes when set properly. So what if the margin moves to 97% with some dynamic range “breakthrough.” Meanwhile, the most common usage bars are 16mp stills and 4K video. All current cameras can achieve those. Getting to 68mp stills or 8K video full frame sounds impressive—and again, I’ll always take more sampling all else equal—but for the most part I see it wasted by the vast majority of users. They’re buying horsepower they don’t need and might never truly use.

The most significant thing it appears most people are gaining these days is points or miles on their credit card. So sure, if buying a new camera helps you jet off to an exotic location to photograph, go for it. Just realize that you’re no longer in the pragmatic camera user category, but in some new elite 1% of image takers. 

It also strikes me that we’re in a period where customers are confused. What camera makers are doing with new products is just confusing them more. 

First off, we have those Worshipers of More I just mentioned. These customers think larger numbers are the thing that makes a new product better. More pixels, faster frame rates, more dynamic range, ad infinitum. Most folk of this congregation respond with their wallet to more, which ironically, makes what’s in their wallet less.

You have to ask yourself at some point “what am I doing (or going to do) with my photos?” For Web work, 2mp is enough (1920x1080). Indeed, if you start trying to push more then you slow the site showing the image down and you’re past the lowest common denominator display needs. For a great two foot wall print, 24mp is more than enough (6000x4000) and has been for some time, as print technologies hide really low level pixel issues due to ink spread, among other things. So what is it you’re doing?

The same thing is true on the video side. FullHD (1920x1080) is the lowest common denominator output and keeps file and transmit sizes manageable. 4K (3840x2160) is basically the top end of what anyone is going to display these days, even Hollywood. Anything more starts to get very costly. Sure, Netflix, Disney et.al., want us to record in 6K or 8K for them to “future proof” the work, but are you Netflix or Disney? 

So what exactly is it you’re trying to accomplish with your images? Do you need anything more than something like a Z6III to do that? 

Yes, I can find small things that the newer, better, “more something” cameras have that’s interesting and technically takes possible quality up a notch. I report those things regularly in my reviews. But have you noticed something consistent in my reviews of digital cameras over the past 21 years? That “How’s it Handle?” section is where most of the meat is, and time after time I find myself complaining about usability or access issues, not the number of pixels, the frame rate, or the things that made the camera new and “better than before.” 

Japan Inc has tried a number of times to put some marketing behind the usability aspect of a product, mostly to ultimate failure. In doing so—and probably the primary reason their marketing failed—they rarely try the “we listened to our customers and fixed the discovery, usability, accessibility, and convenience problems they told us about” line. That’s partly because they don’t actually know how to listen to customers, but also partly because engineering isn’t about design at most product makers. Tokyo needs to read my Good Design, Good Images article and do a thorough self-examination afterwards.

Many of you will remember that I’ve lambasted people who said a camera made photography fun for them. On the Interwebs I’m known as a Fun Hater. But I’m actually not. The word they’re looking for is “enjoyable.” When was the last time you said you enjoyed using your camera? Because that, too, goes along with what you’re trying to accomplish with your images. You should have a goal for your imagery, and you should enjoy using the tools that help you achieve that goal. 

To my point of view, the camera makers have lost sight of user goals, and is constantly trying to just churn updates and upgrades and dangle them in front of customers hoping to reel in cash. Many of the customers, too, have lost sight of both those things. You should enjoy taking photos, and the gear you use should help you do that, not become a biannual tithe to Tokyo. 

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Reminder

Thom Live Online Returns

At the end of this month, my teaching partner Mark Comon and I will have two free online presentations (presentations will be recorded for those of you who can’t make it to the actual session, but you have to sign up to get the recording). 

The first presentation, on July 28th, is all about the Nikon ZR as a still photography camera. Discover what Nikon never promoted (that the ZR is a very good still camera, but needs attention to how you set it up for that). We even have a ZR present for those that register, plus a drawing for SmallRig add-ons, free byThom books, and an exclusive t-shirt. 

The second presentation, on July 29th, deals with our just-completed photo workshop in Botswana. It was a very different year in 2026 in Botswana, with the primary park completely closed to tourism due to the high water levels caused by this season’s record rains. I’ll be talking about how water defines and refreshes the Okavango, and Mark will be talking about how adventure travel is sometimes actually adventure. But don’t worry. Animals were not harmed in the massive flood, they just moved out of the way, which introduced plenty of new opportunities for those that accompanied us on this year's trip. Meanwhile, I'll tell you the full story about how water shapes the experience in the Okavango. Most people think you just go to Africa for the lions and other predators. But do you know the reason why those predators are actually there in the first place? Turns out that elephant poop, papyrus, where hippos walk, and a host of other odd things all play key roles in defining why the Okavango is one of the best wildlife viewing habitats in the world. I promise there will be no pop quiz at the end, but you’ll still probably want to retain the information I present. 

My Lightroom comments continue to get a lot of attention, so we’ll continue the conversation one last time.

First up, I want to point out that my dilemma isn’t that Lightroom doesn’t have a lot of features or performance. It’s soley my observation that I’m not sure that Adobe is doing enough to both satisfy existing users and attract new ones for me to continue to recommend it as the go-to choice. 

This centers on something I write about a lot: what user problem is being solved? For Lightroom, that originally was the late Jeff Schewe’s observation that now that serious photographers where taking many more photos, we needed a place to put them, organize them, and process them (when necessary). Lightroom’s genious was that it treated your ingested images as components in a database, but designed the database to operate in ways that would directly solve photographers’ key needs. The database itself was well hidden from the Lightroom user, but the benefits of the data-driven approach were externalized in a UI that was (mostly) what a photographer might want to use. 

The problem with the database approach is two-fold now. For someone new to collecting, maintaining, and processing photographs, Lightroom Classic's a bit much. For someone who’s been using it for a long period of time the size and complexity of the underlying data is starting to feel slow or cumbersome, and deep dives into your material get more difficult if you didn’t get it 100% organized the first time around. That last bit is where some AI-based browser/catalogs are starting to look faster, more modern, and direct.

I’ll give a personal example of how things can start to not work right with Lightroom. When I needed some photos of Chas Glazer for my recent article on his death, I knew immediately where to look for them and just pointed Photo Mechanic at the appropriate folders. A quick scroll and I found what I wanted. Had I been using Lightroom, finding those images of Chas would have more dependent upon me having entered the right keywords and doing the right organization within Lightroom for the database-driven filters to find them quickly. My observation is that not many Lightroom Classic users have been doing enough keywording and organization to quickly pull up exactly what they need, and some of that has to do with the way the program has grown coupled with the way the UI is scattered. 

Lightroom Classic as it stands today is a very good program, but it’s starting to rely too much on the user solving their own problems, and not enough on the program solving the user problems. Frankly, I believe it’s due for a fairly strong overhaul if it’s going to remain the go-to choice for serious photographers. Which is why I asked the question of my readership.

It seems that quite a few of you agree with me that we’ve sort of come to a crossroad with Lightroom Classic, and some of you are clearly taking a different route now. At the same time, a large group of you are fine, but would just like a few refinements here and there. 

For now, I’m leaving my recommendation intact. But, as always, I’ll continue to examine what’s available and try to make rational and justified recommendations as we move forward.

Meanwhile, here’s some additional followup to your comments:

“I now use DxO PhotoLab.” 

Of all the folk that left Lightroom Classic (or are in the middle of leaving it), this was the number one destination. I tend to concur. While PhotoLab has some limits and needs a bit more polish, it’s a really solid product now, and produces consistent, excellent results.

“I’m using DxO PhotoLab for processing, but still use the Lightroom catalog.” 

This brings up an interesting point. As imaging software has gotten better, I’ve found that my processing of an image taken five or more years ago is improved if I just start over. So having Lightroom Classic remember all my choices really isn’t all that useful as time elapses and we process differently. The interesting thing is that if you stop paying for Lightroom Classic, the catalog still works. So if you’re really just leaning on Lightroom for cataloging, paying the monthly tithe isn’t buying you much. 

I think I’m going to have to do a video on this for the upcoming byThom MAX to show you what I mean, and how much you can rely upon an expired subscription version of Lightroom Classic. But that’s for future Thom to deal with, right now current Thom is writing this. 

“Another lock-in might be profiles.” 

For a few users that have been using things like the Lumariver Profile Designer, yes, I can see that. I’d generally say, though, that if you’re running other profiling with Lightroom Classic, that’s a bit of a failure on Adobe’s part. As I wrote recently about color, Adobe’s own color models aren’t optimal for a Nikon user (and maybe not for other brands, too, though I’ve stopped trying to evaluate that). I’ve been harping on that for over a decade. Many of you don’t remember that Nikon had a plug-in for Photoshop which did the demosaic for NEF files early in the digital era, and we got used to Photoshop results matching camera results. Then the “breakup” occurred with D2x, and Adobe went their own way. 

“Sidecars are a problem.”

Yes and no. There’s no clear win on this issue. If you want reversable changes to a file, then data has to be saved in addition to the results. If you save data in the file, this starts to make the file potentially incompatible with other products, as they may not see/use that data. If you save the data outside the file in a sidecar, then you have the problem that the original file and sidecar need to be kept together. The good news here is that .XMP data is now a recognized standard, so perhaps we’ll see better solutions moving forward as more programs learn to use it within a file, and more operating systems learn that they have to manage a pair of files together. 

“If you keep running Lightroom Classic on the same computer for a decade, it will get slower. OS upgrades demand more resources, you have more files than you did with the slower drives you probably have, and so on.”

Absolutely. The notion that you just buy a computer and use it forever is a false hope. At least if you’re doing more than just Web browsing, email, and other casual uses (which can be done perfectly well on a phone or tablet these days, so I’m not sure why you’re holding onto a computer forever). 

For Mac users, the M1 chips and reliance on SSD changed things. There’s a real line in the sand that happened around 2019, and if you’re on the wrong side of that line, that the “things are getting slower” problem isn’t solely due to Lightroom Classic, it’s a foundational issue you’re facing. Double that if you’re still relying upon hard drives and anything slower than Thunderbolt for external drives. On the Windows side, it isn’t so clear, but I’ve felt that the Wintel platform has been long-in-the-tooth and not keeping up for some time now. 

Security concerns alone—if your computer connects to the Internet then you have security concerns—are starting to force hardware upgrades, as well, as neither Apple nor Microsoft can really afford to keep everything they’ve ever made secure forever. The question I get asked a lot is “how long will my new computer be good for?” The answer is forked: (a) if you’re a casual user not pushing performance boundaries of any kind and bought enough computer to start with, then probably right until your manufacturer no longer supports it with security updates (for Apple that tends to be about seven to ten years); and (b) if you need top-level performance, then you should be upgrading every other generation, which tends to be about every two or three years. So that’s the range: two to ten years, and no more.

The good news is that typically when you update your computer, you’ll get a bit of performance back, even if your Lightroom catalog has grown mammoth. On the Mac side, that’s mostly been due to faster memory and SSD with each generation.

“Picture Window Pro is still available.”

Hmm, yes Picture Window Pro is still available. Jonathan Sachs, the author, was one of the co-founders of Lotus and helped create Lotus 1-2-3, a seminal Windows spreadsheet. While it appears that Jonathan is still maintaining the program, the UI is still very 1990’s (if I recall correctly, Jonathan started his digital photography exploration about the same time as I did in the late 80’s). Nothing overly wrong with that, though this Windows-only program will immediately conjure up visions of Windows 95 when you use it. 

“You avoided any discussion of Lightroom (cloud) versus Lightroom Classic.”

I was hoping you wouldn’t notice ;~). 

Adobe, like all the big tech players, wants to “own you.” Getting you de-centralized—your images stored on the company’s servers, not your computer—is a common technique to do that. I’m not a fan. Some things, yes, belong on centralized servers, but generally not personal data. The supposed benefit for photographers is that all your photos can be shared by all your devices. Almost all the big players here (Apple, Google, Microsoft) neglect to tell you that you can do the same thing locally with a NAS (network attached storage). A NAS does take a bit of geekdom to set up properly for that, so the cloud companies would also say they’re selling your convenience when you lock into their centralized solution. 

I don’t really see Adobe being one of the big players in cloud storage. I don’t think they have the size or the user base to be a winner in that category, though they can certainly build a niche offering that might be profitable for them. Lightroom (not Lightroom Classic) was an attempt to bring the local image handling capabilities to the cloud realm, and across all your devices (phone, tablet, computer). It sort of works, though with a few dissonances to the Classic product that might trip you up. 

I think that Adobe was looking more to the so-called creators as opposed to photographers when Lightroom and the cloud aspects were being fleshed out. But now that Apple is building out their own Creative Suite, I’ve found it simpler and easier to work with that for the role I think Adobe was trying to fill. 

But in general, I kept my discussion centered on Lightroom Classic, because that is what most of my readers have been using and are (sometimes) complaining about.

“Adobe telegraphed the future years ago when they named it Lightroom Classic instead of Desktop. It’s a legacy product from their point of view.”

True that. However it’s a cash cow that’s not being properly milked. Nor is Adobe seemingly trying to grow the herd. A strange metaphor, to be sure, but this is almost exactly my point: Adobe could do better. If they don’t, I can’t see anything other than a slow demise to Lightroom Classic’s user base as more modern and better solutions appear.

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And with that, I’m going to put a stake in the ground and say that we’ve surveyed the property thoroughly, and this is where we land. Not that I won’t again cover Adobe or its products in the future. It’s that I’ve resolved for the moment to continue recommending Lightroom Classic. If I change my mind on that, I’ll pull up the stake and we’ll do another survey…

FWIW, this was one of the pending things I needed to work through as I rewrite my Web site, so thanks for the help. As I’ve noted before, I’m going through everything on byThom (other than the news) and rewriting it. I want the new site when it appears to be current, even better considered and written than before, and accurate to my thoughts today, not yesterday. 

Well, that story woke you up!

My comments about Adobe possibly missing a step with Lightroom provoked quite a few of you to send me an email. Indeed, more so than any other article this year, and by a fair margin. As such, it’s worth dipping into your comments and questions and doing a follow up. 

It seems a lot of you agreed with my basic contention that Adobe isn’t exactly innovating with Lightroom any more (though they do keep adding features to it, but usually after they do it for Photoshop/ACR). For instance, the following was a fairly common reaction I received:

“I’m a serious enthusiast with a library of nearly 80k images from the past 15+ years and maintaining that library is a huge priority for me. I'm still burned many years later from Apple abruptly ending Aperture. I switched to Lightroom Classic mostly because I thought it was least likely to have an Aperture-style ending. My plan has been to basically accept the "catalog lock in" you describe even as its obvious Lightroom Classic is not Adobe's focus or preferred path forward.”

A lot of you got to Lightroom as an escape from Apple’s abandonment of Aperture (bad move, Apple). You weren’t locked into Aperture’s catalog as it turned out, as several ways to migrate to Adobe quickly appeared, and that’s how many of you got to Lightroom Classic in the first place; it was the best alternative to what you were doing when what you were doing went away.

“I started to think that Adobe was finally putting some work into Lightroom Classic as the newer updates have been appreciated. The AI masking in particular and the duplicate tools and culling is appreciated (I haven't tried them yet, so maybe they suck).  But my biggest problem now is how to get rid of all the crap photos I have that the iPhones in my household take and that cameras with insane burst rates leave you with. Seems like your point is that Classic is getting these last and almost begrudgingly, but its also true that editing photos today in Classic gives me better results in much less time than when we were in Africa 10 years ago. Maybe there are other tools that are better but as a hobbyist I don't have time to try them all. Recently I have been using Excire in conjunction with Lightroom. The AI search is excellent. With over 300k photos in my catalog I can just say "show me pictures of Louie riding his red jeep" and get what I am looking for. And I can do it without uploading my collection to some cloud.“

This exposes one of the reasons why I haven’t yet stopped recommending Lightroom Classic, but also why I am pondering whether I should. Yes, Adobe is still updating the program, and we sometimes get new useful features, but as you point out with Excire, we now have a number of products that apply AI against a set of images better than Adobe does at the cataloging level. It was the catalog that was Lightroom’s big win for photo enthusiasts and pros, but now it is lagging what is possible, and by quite some margin, I’d suggest. The question is becoming “if you want to catalog and search your images, is there a better starting place?” Raw converters and photo editors can be called by any catalog program, after all, so if your primary workflow sits inside the catalog, then Lightroom has fallen far behind. 

“A lot of what keeps me on Lightroom Classic and Photoshop, and I suspect a lot of others, is that the other tools aren’t substantially better. Enough so to make it worth the effort of relearning a whole new system, building a new workflow, and tools that may or may not work with whatever I would move to.”

I’d agree with that assessment, with an exception, thus my original article. Note my Excire comments, above. The one tool that has gotten substantial better with other software is non-filter, non-structure finding of images in a “catalog.” Adobe’s features beyond that are minimal and nascent, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve seen clearly better from multiple products now. 

“I continue using Lightroom Classic. I've used Lightroom and nothing else since 2011. It's what I know, it's where my catalogs are, and my needs are comparatively minimal. Having said that, I think it runs much more slowly now as compared to five years ago. I don't use any of the cloud-based aspects of Adobe; everything is local for me. I get the sense that there's nothing I can do to make it run faster. I know all the basic methods and it runs the same either way.”

Comments like this one were very common among the responses: (a) used Lightroom Classic for a long time; (b) don’t want to use cloud; and (c) seems to run slower now.

Running slower isn’t something I can specifically help with at the moment. I don’t use Lightroom’s cataloging except for a few small tasks (workshops, finished JPEG gallery). Nothing I do would tend to slow down Lightroom because I’m only dealing with a small number of files, and many of those are small themselves. But slowness does seem like a common complaint, so it’s perhaps something I should look into for my reader base.

“It’s also plug-in lock.” 

Those that use services and push files from Lightroom said this, and perhaps that’s true. However, the number of people locked this way is far lower than the number who believe they’re locked into Lightroom’s Catalog. 

“For context, my history starts with the Lightroom betas, even before 1.0. Over the years Lightroom got better in some ways, and worse in others. Eventually I felt the ‘bad’ outweighed the ‘good’ and ditched it for Capture One, followed by DxO PhotoLab. But now I’m back on Lightroom. Why? It isn’t that Lightroom has magically improved. It is because Lightroom is the only software (of the major commercial photo editors) that supports HDR editing in the Develop module. Capture One doesn’t have it, nor does DxO. By “HDR” I don’t mean the fake tone mapping or combining over- and under-exposed photos that has been around for decades.

I edit photos mainly for visual use, not print, so HDR has real benefit. Granted, this is a rather niche use case, as one needs an HDR-capable monitor to appreciate it (such as the Apple Pro Display HDR or the current Studio Display XDR or one of the M-series MacBook Pros with mini-LED screens). But such displays are becoming more common, and not just from Apple. So as much as I would prefer to use some alternative to Lightroom, it has one “superpower” over the others: native HDR editing.”

An interesting perspective, for sure. I’m sure Greg Benz would agree with you. The only problem here is that still photography continues to lag in terms of display. HDR is standardized and ubiquitous in the video world, from capture to display. The problem still photography has is that HDR hasn’t yet really been standardized from capture to display. Yet. At the point that happens—I hope it happens—I’m pretty sure every surviving photo software tool will rush to add HDR. And then we’ll be right back to discussing the Catalog Lock-In problem. 

“I don’t feel that Lightroom Classic is being enshitified more so than any other old large program (Excel and Word being the poster children).”

Don’t get me started on Microsoft. Talk about failures, Word data files are still 32-bit restrained. What engineer in Redmond never made it to the 21st century? 

I’m fully with Doctorow on this one: companies that want to still have customers should stop dumping on them. I believe it’s way more than possible to both do your customer a service as well as make a reasonable or better profit. The reason that isn’t always happening has to do with greed at the top. The incentives for top management now have nothing to do with product or customers. 

Over my career I’ve watched a lot of companies forget that customers buy products. If you’re going to take people to the outhouse, you should not expect them to come back. And when they don’t, your business suddenly doesn’t look so good, and you’ll end up starting one form of death spiral unless someone at the top gets wise. And to that last bit:

“For what it's worth, and not public knowledge per se, we happen to have a friend who is high up at Adobe. The company knows it has a problem and people are on board trying to turn the ship.”

Okay, great. But battleships are difficult to turn. There was a time when Lightroom was more a versatile destroyer and much nimbler. It will be interesting to see what Adobe does with the Topaz Labs acquisition. I’d hope that they’d add Topaz-derived sharpening to Photoshop and Lightroom, as the sharpening capabilities of both programs are long-in-the-tooth. 

“Is there a best practice or methodology for being more catalog agnostic?”

Simple answer: make sure that your data files are organized in a well-considered and well-named folder structure, and that your images are well-named, as well. Do not allow any product, including Lightroom Classic to just place and name things automatically or even semi-automatically. Even if you’re using a cataloging product, the minute you acquiesce to just letting it do what it wants, you lose control, and when you lose control, your options without that catalog product become quite problematic and limited. Your images should all be in a master folder, separated into some sub-folder system within that folder (year, place, event, subject, etc.), and every folder and every photo needs to have a name that’s searchable. DSC_0001 is not searchable. That master images folder needs to be backed up, both onsite and offsite, if you wish to truly make sure your images are always recoverable.

One problem here is that “edits” for files can live either in the file or outside the file in a sidecar .XMP file. This is one of the “lock-in” aspects of Lightroom Classic that keeps people in that system. Any transition to another product has to deal with this, and it’s not pretty.

I used to have a couple specific articles about this, but I’m currently in the process of completely rewriting the Learn section of bythom, and this question is on my to-do list to answer more fully, so stand by.

“Isn’t almost all the metadata added to my images—by myself religiously (I wish!) with Bridge, or by my camera and RAW processor(s)—pretty much standardized, in some cases by Adobe themselves, and indexed by macOS and Windows file systems? I thought that if I wasn’t too lazy and would try and master Spotlight on my Mac I could search and filter my images via the macOS file system.  Combined with a personal naming system, that largely eliminated my desire for a vendor specific catalog (Lightroom).”

Uh, maybe? That certainly is the expectation. The devil is in the details, though. The .XMP extension stands for Extendable Metadata Platform. It’s now an ISO standard (16684-1:2012). However, the standard is simply a standard for putting things into metadata, not specific required metadata. This is where the issues begin, and the big question becomes does the software you’re currently using understand the things that were put in the .XMP file?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Moreover, there’s also the case of converting a file to a different format, as .XMP data goes in different places with different types of files when it gets internalized. So, if you save a file to PNG, .XMP data needs to go into a specific spot: an iTXt block with the XML:com.adobe.xmp keyword. Yeah, getting kinda techie here. Some programs do the right thing, some don’t. 

As to your specific Spotlight question I had to resort to some deep AI research to get a somewhat reliable answer, and that explains my “maybe” response. Moreover, Spotlight is scheduled to change in macOS Golden Gate, so the answer may change. Specifically, Spotlight looks within files, but cannot associate files. It will find keywords, description, authors, copyright, in your image files for instance. If your metadata is in a sidecar file (xxxxxxxx.XMP), yes Spotlight will find text in the metadata, however, it can’t associate that with the actual image file.

As a side benefit, my AI also provided a way to sync keywords to finder tags for NEF files, so if you’re geeky and trust your AI, you might try that.

“To further enforce your theory that Adobe may have missed a turn or two, look at their stock price over the last year or two. Investors seem to be aware also that the company is faltering.”

From an investor’s point of view the issue has been growth: where does additional revenue and profit come from? Adobe’s in a tricky place, as for the most part they have gobbled up all the folk that can afford their product. But they can’t really raise prices easily, as that would likely trigger defections. The best way for Adobe to grow is via additional products, and you see them trying to do that with Firefly and now the Topaz acquisition. Perhaps at the corporate level Adobe has some growth room (pricing and products), but for the individual user I think they’ve hit the ceiling for now. But that makes it even more important to keep those individuals tithing, and lack of updates that add things those users want fixed or added can result in a slow leak on the subscription side. 

“I started using Nitro Photos since I can use the finder/file system and have the same organization I’ve used since 2009 with Lightroom Classic.” 

Nitro Photo is the work of the original manager of the Apple Aperture project (as is Raw Power). It is somewhat akin to the way Aperture worked many moons ago. For macOS users, it’s definitely a possibility. On the Windows side, ACDSee is probably a product some should look at (though the developing module isn’t as refined as Adobe’s).

“On the comparisons of noise reduction and sharpening tools: does Dx0 do a better job than Lightroom Classic?”

Uh, maybe? We have lots of different noise and sharpening tools these days. Can I make an argument for one over another? Yes, though this constantly changes with updates. I’d make the same argument with NR as I do with monitor profiles: using any tool gets you 90%+ of the way to what you can do, and you probably can’t really see or justify the other 10%-. Adobe, DxO, onOne, et.al., now all have reasonable NR tools that use AI. My contention would be: pick one and use it. Don’t deep end into trying to find the “best.” 

“Two problems arise for me in the next year. I need to upgrade to Windows 11 (which means a new machine) or change OS to Linux. Noise reduction on Linux is not state of the art, though DaVinci Resolve 21 for stills is a possibility. Plus I’d need a program to ingest raw images and import only the new photos. Any suggestions?”

Probably “bite the bullet” (buy a new machine with Windows 11). I’ll have to admit I’m not a Linux gear head. One of things you have to accept if you’re going to Linux is that it is not a system that commercial software developers target, as the Linux community is mostly Open Source and free advocates. Thus, great new idea and innovative software tends to happen in macOS and Windows environments, plus your choices are broader and deeper on the commercial OS's. 

I’m sure that some Linux fans will jump in and tell me all about the great free options that are available, but in my experience, those tend to be geeky, less feature-packed, and slower in performance than the macOS and Windows commercial “equivalents”. I put “equivalents” in quotes because, other than perhaps DaVinci Resolve, there aren’t many actual truly equivalent products on the Linux platform. 

The problem with buying a new machine is that you’d now be paying the AI tax (memory and storage costs are rising). Perhaps you can still find machines at the older prices that are acceptable, but those will all be going away soon to be replaced by ones with higher list prices. 

“What is your recommended raw catalog and editing software that does not have a subscription payment scheme?”

There really isn’t one. And that’s sort of my point about catalog lock-in: once you’re using catalogs to manage an image collection, you’re stuck in that ecosystem. It’s very difficult to escape.

You’re also not going to like my answer to your question: there isn’t a perfect alternative, thus my current dilemma on whether to recommend Lightroom still. Basically, if you want “really good” software, it has to be profitable for the software developer. The old model of selling updates has long had economic problems, as it means most of a company’s income comes in spurts, and development cycles aren’t as predictable as you think, so a company can go a long period without reasonable income. Subscriptions give a software developmer a known, stable source of cash. My only issue with Adobe’s subscriptions is what happens when you stop paying; most other developers have a better policy on this.

But to fully answer your question: you’d have to give up on catalogs and just go to a fast browser, such as FastRawViewer. That implies that your images aren’t scattered all over the place and are well organized in folders (though AI is changing this). You could then process selected images from the browser with several alternatives, such as Affinity or your company’s free raw converter. Be prepared for slower performance and missing features when you go to the free products.