Lightroom catalog management for photographers switching to cheaper software

The moment someone realises they have a problem is when they've decided Lightroom Classic is no longer worth $10–$20/month for how little they use it, but their entire editing history — years of metadata, star ratings, color labels, develop settings, and folder structure — is locked in a proprietary catalog file. They want to leave. They cannot, cleanly.

This is a structural lock-in problem, not a technical limitation. Adobe has every incentive to make catalog export painful. The .lrcat format is documented enough that third parties can read it, but the combination of develop settings, face recognition data, publish history, and smart collection logic is complex enough that no lightweight migration path exists today. Users complain about the price constantly, but the actual switching cost is the invisible tax that keeps them paying.

What makes this worse is that the alternatives — particularly Affinity Photo, which appears in this same complaint set — don't import Lightroom catalogs. So a photographer who wants to move faces a painful manual process: export every edited photo as a TIFF or DNG, lose their non-destructive history, and start over. For someone with 50,000 photos, that's not a weekend project.

This is a business because the need is created by a pricing model that keeps generating defectors. Every time Adobe raises prices or changes its subscription tiers, another cohort of users decides the cost isn't justified — those users write 'the price!!' in reviews — and each of them faces the same migration wall. The customer acquisition cost is low because they're already motivated to switch; the job to be done is concrete and one-time per customer, but the total addressable pool keeps growing.

What to build

Build a desktop migration tool that reads a Lightroom Classic .lrcat file and exports a structured folder hierarchy with XMP sidecar files containing all develop settings, ratings, labels, and keywords in a format that imports cleanly into Affinity Photo and other non-Adobe editors.

Where to start

Target Lightroom Classic users in photography hobbyist communities who publicly post about canceling Adobe subscriptions; offer a free migration for catalogs under 5,000 photos to generate word-of-mouth, then charge for larger catalogs.

The hard part

Adobe occasionally changes internal catalog schema between Lightroom versions, so the parser has to be version-aware and tested against real catalogs from users — getting enough diverse real-world test catalogs before launch, without a public beta pool, is the first hard problem.

How it makes money

One-time flat fee ($29–$49) per catalog migration, with no subscription; optional paid support tier for catalogs over 100,000 images or those with complex smart collections.