LR, new Laptop, any suggestions?

Hello,

I am completely out of loop technologically so hope you don't mind me asking here for some probably quite basic stuff.

So my Dell XPS 15 is 11 years old. It's absolutely had a good round 😂. It was high spec for what they offered when I bought it and certainty always performed well. But for a while it's been, well, dying. It needs replacing end of this year / early next.

My conundrum is I have taken a step back from pro shooting since pandemic, for various reasons that I won't go into. However I still photograph and use it for my forging business regularly.... Like I need to be able to photograph my work and share it.

I have Lightroom 6 on the laptop. Never went into the subscription model as none of my cameras required the newer version. Also don't particularly like subscribing to a million things, which seems to be the norm these days.

Am I able to transfer the copy of lightroom I have from this laptop to a new one? Is that possible?

If not can you buy this old stand alone LR 6 anywhere anymore?

Or is subscribing and paying like £120 a year for LR the only option if you wish to edit your photos these days?

Is there any alternative to LR?

Thanks,
Richard

Good to hear from you again Richard,

If you registered your LR with Adobe, you should be able to see on your account on the Adobe website, and note how many 'licences' you have used. So it may be possible to just use one of your unused licences to install LR on a new laptop.

There are many alternatives to LR these days, and it will depend I guess on how much editing you wish to do, and how much you depend on LR to manage your photo libraries.

At the free-end, there is the open-source Dark Table & Gimp.
Some photographers have moved to One1 Raw, which has both outright purchase and subscription modes.

Capture One used to have a buy a stand alone version, but alas, that has ended.

If you get a Macbook, their own photo management tools combined with the very powerful and cheap, Pixelmator Pro has much to recommend it. It has some very capable layer and masking tools and an astonishingly low price.

Wētāpunga wrote: Good to hear from you again Richard, If you registered your LR with Adobe, you should be able to see on your account on the Adobe website, and note how many 'licences' you have used. So it may be possible to just use one of your unused licences to install LR on a new laptop. There are many alternatives to LR these days, and it will depend I guess on how much editing you wish to do, and how much you depend on LR to manage your photo libraries. At the free-end, there is the open-source Dark Table & Gimp. Some photographers have moved to One1 Raw, which has both outright purchase and subscription modes. Capture One used to have a buy a stand alone version, but alas, that has ended. If you get a Macbook, their own photo management tools combined with the very powerful and cheap, Pixelmator Pro has much to recommend it. It has some very capable layer and masking tools and an astonishingly low price.

Ah would I have registered it with adobe, this is the question. Is there any reason I wouldn't have? It's obviously a legit copy but it's so long ago, I really don't know. Would I have an account via an email somewhere?

Thank you for the references for alternatives to LR as well, much appreciated!

I am likely going to stay with windows, just as its what I've always used / are familiar with. But I'll certainly have a look and consider the mac options when I come to it.

Currently doing everything from my phone and it's not fun at all 😂📱

Hello Richard. Sorry to read about your struggles, I’m sure it is very frustrating. FWIW, and you probably don’t want to hear this, I have travelled on the same path for LR and various other applications and in the inevitable end I decided that as photography is my primary hobby I would cough up the Adobe monthly subs and now use LR Classic, PS and PS Beta (with AI).

The updates are frequent and amazing compared with my old Elements programs and I have no regrets what so ever.

It is all about horses for courses of course but as technology advances at its present rate, hanging on can only get worse as computers and software move further and further away from backward compatibility.

Good luck with your quest.

Brian

Neil & Brian, thank you for your thoughts. I welcome alternatives and acknowledge I am delaying rather than saying I'll never 'subscribe' to the software. So I'll certainly consider this as well.

@Neil, indeed I'll keep an eye on the memory! I forget what I had but u did upgrade the memory and to an ssd hdd mid way through the current laptops life, made a significant difference.

I do realise it ain't tons of money (you think I can afford a pint somewhere in London?? 😂😂🍻), but after only just covering from the financial ruin of the pandemic, I am cautious, I am always sensible with these things. Everything adds up, doesn't it. We're also living in a 6% interest rate, which is statistically hits my generation a little harder (no offence intended!). So if I can resist this additional outgoing, for a while, it would certainly be felt.

Worth nothing that it's all good and well that tech moves on and benefits are felt, but my setup does do the job (other than my laptop being broken 😂), I'm completely flooded with work the past 6 months, and will be for the next 4 at least.

pegelli wrote: Another reason I don't like the subscription model for LR is that you're basically locked in into perpetuity. ...

This isn't the only software to do so. Once I stop paying the subscription for C1 I'm also cut off.
The only saving grace there is I can revert back to an older copy of C1 which I still have a licence for. But then, I'm using an older version of some software.

This is why I suggested the option of getting a MacBook (and I should add, perhaps even a Mac mini).
The Apple Photos App can open RAW files and edit these, so that provides a library function and basic raw editor, that comes with the Mac.

And Pixelmator Pro isn't subscription. It's very cheap to buy relative to almost anything else (≅NZ35.00). And it's far better than its price tag would suggest. It's layer, masking and editing tools are extremely good and powerful, it's also a raw editor that integrates with Apple photos, and it has some ML algorithms for enlargements, noise reduction etc that are extremely good. It's certainly a better 'photo editor' than the older versions of LR I'm familiar with.

If you weren't so ambitious you needed all the tools that say Photoshop has, I think a lot of photographers could get by with this Apple Photos/Pixelmator Pro combination.

Just a small update, seems I have survived the transition!

Managed to re-download and register CS5 package as before (this one was registered with Adobe online).

Tried extensively to get Lightroom 6.0 to get working on the new laptop but just wouldn't accept serial number. No idea why and digging around it seems you could actually register it on two devices anyway, as long as they weren't used simultaneously (I imagine for if you used a desktop / laptop combo, or different work/home locations).

Turns out I was actually running Lightroom 5.7.1, not 6.0. Not sure how I missed that last update?? But anyway, found a download for 5.7.1 and boom, serial number worked straight away! Hurrah!

Thank you all for the help, much appreciated!

The difference in tech in 11 years and a brand new laptop vs a broken one is incredible (I just went for the same XPS 15 thing that I had before).