All of my photos are stored in a big Lightroom database. If I wasn't using an old camera supported by Lightroom 5 (that I bought outright in 2011), and was using modern Lightroom instead, I would have to pay an ongoing cost just to maintain access to my photo database, in perpetuity.

This sucks no matter how much the subscription actually is right now. Losing access to all your old work in its original format if you don't pay a subscription to a company that might decide to do anything, up to and including shutting down the servers and killing the app? No thank you.

Yeah, Lightroom 5 hasn't had any updates, doesn't support any new cameras, etc. But it still works, I can still look at all the photos I took with my old camera, and all my edits, and this will work, for free, until Lightroom 5 bitrots away into not working on Windows 14 or whatever.

It sucks that I can't just buy a new version of Lightroom when I get a new camera, instead I'd have to jump ship or sell my soul to Adobe.

I understand what you're saying, and yeah, that does suck.

> Losing access to all your old work in its original format

Most photo editing apps retain your originals, even when they're in a database. For example, Apple Photos has a folder full of originals with no modifications. Does Lightroom not have this?

I understand that there is a lot of metadata that you also want, I'm just curious about this detail?

Lightroom's edits are non-destructive, so the original format of the edited photos exists within Lightroom's database or inside Lightroom's sidecar files. Yes, all my original photos are safe, but they are unprocessed raw and jpegs. I could plausibly render out my entire library and probably should, but it's the difference between a PSD and a PNG.

(I did investigate open source tools back in 2011 but essentially no libraries could even decode the raw format my camera uses for years)

I've adopted a workflow like this:

Camera -> Photo Mechanic ingest/culling onto laptop -> edit RAWs in DxO Photolab -> export .jpg 100% for web into "Web" subfolder for event -> pick top shots for socials, export insta-optimized shape & quality into "Socials" subfolder for event -> backup RAW/Web/Socials folder hierarchy to external SSD for backup and upload "Web" subfolder to Google Photos for sharing & "JPG backup".

I keep about a year's worth of RAW edits + JPGs on my laptop before periodically clearing space, and I have some of my overall top shots stored separately on my Pixieset site.

I think the modifications here are the "original work" in question. Like, I would be wanting to save the thing I spent a lot of time myself working on -- the edits to the photos -- in their "original format": the way Lightroom is dealing with it as modifications on top of raw photos.

My beef isn't with products where you have a choice between perpetual and monthly. It's with products where you don't. This includes the "always-online freemium" model, where you only really lose features over time to drive free -> paid migration and show growth.

Why would I pay $5 a month for Final Cut Pro when I can use davinci resolve for free?