Why I started LightPhotos

What I learned

• Keep your photos as plain files. A backup helps only if an app can open it.
• Buying software once does not mean that you can always use it. A macOS upgrade stopped my Lightroom license, and nothing warned me.
• More features made the free editors harder for me. They could do everything, so I could not get started.
• Write the list before the code. The list helped me say no to everything else.

Nothing fit

I am an amateur photographer. I shoot RAW with my Sony full-frame camera, so the camera saves the unprocessed sensor data, and most shots need a little work before I share them.

Luminar AI is good, but its experience and performance are not what I wanted. A Lightroom subscription costs $10 each month for an app that I open only sometimes.

I like Apple Photos. It is beautiful and fast. But it keeps the full library in a single file, in a format that only Apple Photos can read. A newer version of macOS did not open the Photos libraries on my older backups, and several years of pictures went with them. I do not control that format, and I will not take that risk again.

A single library also does not fit how I keep my files. Recent work is on the main drive of my laptop, and older shoots move to other drives. I do not want hundreds of gigabytes in a library that I might not be able to open in a few years.

So I built one

That afternoon, I started a basic version. I did not try to copy Lightroom. I wanted the smallest thing that could get these photos to my friends. This was the list:

1. Open a folder and show the photos in it.
2. Rate photos from 1 to 5, to go through a shoot quickly and mark the keepers.
3. Filter by rating, to edit only the photos that I like.
4. Adjust exposure, highlights, shadows, and the other basic settings.
5. Keep all adjustments non-destructive. The editor never changes the original file, so I can always undo an edit.
6. Export selected photos to JPEG, ready to send.
7. Run on a Mac.

What else I am trying to learn

Coding agents write most of the code. An agent gives you code that compiles and runs, but that code can give the wrong result some of the time, or crash in a case that nobody tested. A photo editor shows these problems quickly. If a slider lags, or a folder of RAW files uses all your memory, you notice immediately.

So LightPhotos is two projects for me. It is the photo editor that I wanted. It is also how I learn what it takes to build software with agents and still care about quality and speed. Most of these posts are about that.

What comes next

In the next post, I go through the big design decisions in LightPhotos and what I gave up for each one. If this sounds familiar, I would like to hear how you dealt with it.