FOSS Photographer
Free of Services and Subscriptions
DATA MANAGEMENTCREATIVITYHARDWARE
Brian Cohoe
7/2/20265 min read
It has been several years since Adobe put in their terms and services that they would steal your work and you could either accept it and continue to pay them to create the art that you love, or tough shit.
Microsoft has decommissioned hundreds of thousands of still good computers by saying, "the equipment cannot handle Windows 11", and that you must upgrade your hardware. And in doing so, pay a subscription for the operating system to use your computer, or tough shit.
Well, one thing that tough shit is good for is fertilizer to make the grass greener on the other side. I am here to tell you that you can work, live, and create without paying subscriptions. Not only that, it is easier than you think.
Operating System
There are a lot of Linux distros out there for you to choose from. I have been using Linux Mint off and on for years, and has been my mainstay since January 2026. It is on my current laptop (Lenovo Thinkpad X13 Yoga) and have not been left wanting. The desktop interface is everything that I need it to be. I can use it as a tablet with the pen and works flawlessly, and I really only jump into the terminal to move things between my laptop and NAS (more on that later). It's user friendly and simple. I could have set up Arch or another in depth distro, but that is so draining to make things work and a waste of my time. I can just grab my laptop and go, especially with the improved power management.
The power management is next level. For the one day that I had Windows 11 on this laptop (11th gen Intel i5), the battery died overnight when I closed the lid at 50%. Now, I can suspend the computer at 20%, leave it for a week, and come back to a battery with 10%. The most intensive work that I do is bulk photo editing, and I can get about 6 hours on a charge. I never tried Windows 11 to find out how it lasted. The temperature management is also great, and very rarely exceed 45c.
Are there issues? Yeah, not a lot of things are native to Linux and there are some monkeying under the hood that needs to happen. Thankfully, it's easier than ever to do that today; the improvements from the last 14 years have been amazing. Apps also crash, but they crashed on Windows with the same frequency.
Catalogue Management
This is by far the most important and first thing that I needed to nail down before leaving Adobe. I have been a photographer for 10 years now and have over 100,000 photos in my catalogue. While I don't need access to everything every day, I need to be able to easily flag, tag, and mark my photos to find them when I want to work on like projects, and keep my yyyy/yyyy-mm/yyyy-mm-dd file structure. That was something Lightroom Classic was very good at.
Enter Digikam. From day one, I have loved it. It works with a NAS (Network Attached Storage), portable hard drives, and local drives easily. It has one of the best tagging systems I have come across because you can nest your tags, such as:
- Canada
--Alberta
---Edmonton
--- Calgary
-- British Columbia
---Vancouver
----Vancouver Aquarium
Then you can drag and drop the tags into where you need them to go, merge if they are like, and fix and just deal with the tags so easily. By far my favourite tagging system. Then there's the geotagging on the map, so you can see everywhere you have taken a photo. If your camera already has the geotag metadata, you're set. You can choose to add it after if you don't.
Because I am a digital nomad, I need to travel light and bringing all hundreds of thousands of photos with me everywhere is unreasonable. My photos are on a server which has a Digikam Docker installation on it, which I have configured to be able to securely my photos through VPN tunnels. Not only does this save me from carrying photos, I can easily back up any new photos to the NAS, access them anywhere, and pull them up to use.
Some of it's issues, you have to follow the manual to ensure that you are using the right database for your equipment to make sure that you have fast access to your photos. It's much slower to import and convert to dng, which I am doing less and less, in favour of working on the RAWs. It is also not the best for rapid raw editing, unlike RapidRaw, which is my preferred editor for fast edits to get out the door.
Quick Editing
RapidRaw is the best quick album and batch editing software that I have found, surpassing Lightroom Classic. I am able to match colour consistency, something I have an issue with in Affinity because switching from one photo to another isn't as immediate. Being able to create and apply presets is easy for that consistency as well. It is a "I shot an event today and need to get samples out" and other high quantity output tasks.
I do not use it for dust removal and more intricate masking, at the current moment it doesn't do what I need it to do, so I will stick with Affinity for doing one image at a time. And it would be nice if it used the XMP and sidecar data.
Detailed Editing
First and foremost, I am skeptical about Affinity, especially after Canva purchased it from Serif. Canva has been buying lots of good creative software and seems to be following in Adobe's footsteps in that regard. By having everything free right now, while very enticing, it does raise flags about pulling the rug out from under the feet of artists after they have built a workflow around it. Call me burned once, twice shy.
With that out of the way, Affinity is excellent (and how to install on Linux) and free. I struggled to wrap my head around photoshop, to the point that I didn't bother. When I started with Serif Affinity Photo, Design, and Publisher, I immediately got it. It's easy to work with and things tend to make more sense.
One of the things that I love about Affinity is being able to do everything in one application, instead of 4 or 5; which is an improvement over Serif, where bouncing between apps to create vector, photo, and design for print, and it's in one file type. Not having to switch is a huge time saver and removes the headache of file compatibility. Being able to do everything in one app is done by the highly customizable workspaces. If you consistently use the same tools, build your own and tweak it to your liking.
