Lightroom/Aperture alternatives that work well with PM?

[sgbotsford]

I'm facing the end of life of Aperture.  I started a trial with Lightroom but 7 days isn't enough to learn it, and Adobe's pricing policies are extortionate. 

So I'm looking for MAC options.    At this point I'm admitting that I don't actually edit pix much.  My issue is cataloging them.   Everyone on the Controlled vocab list says PM for keywording.

That said, non-destructive editing is good.

I like PM's use of sidecar files.  Aftershot Pro does sidecars too, but they name them differently.  I want meta data to be able to 'round trip'  That is, if my editor is FOO, then I want to initially add keywords in PM, import into FOO, add more metadata there:  (Cropped ugly sister out) see it in PM.  Add other metadata in PM, and have the changes visible in the other program.

I'm happy with having to quit one program while using the other.  I'm trying to avoid the "Write out all updates to sidecar files / wait 4 hours / start PM again.

Am I making sense?

[Mick O (Camera Bits)]

I have been testing out the new raw editor for Mac called Luminar (made by Macphun).  It is a fairly excellent raw processor, as far as I can tell from editing my own photos.  However, it doesn't play very well with PM, as it pretty much strips all metadata, creates a new file format (.lmnr) that has no thumbnail.   I could imagine coming up with a workflow using Luminar where after you edit your Raw files and export them, you could use PM to copy metadata from original Raw files, but it seems like that might be cumbersome. But as you say if you actually edit pics rarely, it may be something you could look into.

It's on my schedule to evaluate the raw processor from on1, but I haven't done it yet.

Mick

[Goughy]

I've been using Affinity Photo which I find quite powerful. They are about to release an update, 1.5 (currently at RC3), which handles metadata much better than in the current version which is fairly broken in that area. I'm not sure how the raw conversion compares to other software but I find it satisfactory for my purposes.

I have only just started using PM in earnest (thanks for the recent discount ) so I haven't tried any roundtripping between it and Affinity Photo yet.

Richard

[Kirk Baker]

So I'm looking for MAC options.    At this point I'm admitting that I don't actually edit pix much.  My issue is cataloging them.   Everyone on the Controlled vocab list says PM for keywording.

That said, non-destructive editing is good.

I like PM's use of sidecar files.  Aftershot Pro does sidecars too, but they name them differently.  I want meta data to be able to 'round trip'  That is, if my editor is FOO, then I want to initially add keywords in PM, import into FOO, add more metadata there:  (Cropped ugly sister out) see it in PM.  Add other metadata in PM, and have the changes visible in the other program.

I'm happy with having to quit one program while using the other.  I'm trying to avoid the "Write out all updates to sidecar files / wait 4 hours / start PM again.

Using PM in concert with Photoshop and its Adobe Camera RAW (ACR) plugin will give you round trip metadata support and non-destructive editing of RAW files.  If you already have Photoshop then give it a try with PM.  If you then save (or convert) your RAW files to DNGs you'll have the side benefit of seeing the adjustments you made in ACR back in Photo Mechanic.  The two work fairly seamlessly together.

-Kirk