I have to be very careful not to "upgrade" it.

photomator is $5 on ios and $50 on mac. 'Splain that.

Anyway, free and open source software never goes subscription pricing (it has no pricing) and tends not to obsolete, if enough people use it and maintain it.

I am photo "focused" and use mostly Preview.app for minor adjustments, which is almost always all I need, given the outstanding jpegs that my (Nikon) cameras put out. And GIMP for tough cases.

I have DarkTable and RawTherapee (both FOSS, free and open source) for advanced work, esp RAW images, and thanks to lagging in my OS updates, I never loaded the free Nikon software, and forgot to do so after upgrading, which may run circles around the others, or not.

The only thing I really miss is an editor for pdf's that cleans up an entire scanned pdf file, usually dingy gray background. And not a subscription. I've got a "subscription" to PG&E that has been doubling every month during this summer of heat waves.

Preview can lighten, darken or threshold pdf's via the "export" function and a quartz filter, but with not so great results.

I really should automate GIMP, or use ImageMagick. I will when one or more batch jobs become critical to me. Sometimes, an expensive app is valuable for little more than its longevity, due to the income from high prices, but they disappear as well.

As an aside, Trello made drastic irreversible changes to their product (app and online) and people are regretting the lock-in to a product where some CFO calls the shots.

https://slate.com/technology/2025/08/trello-app-update-big-tech-ai-google-microsoft-apple.html

If they had installed or outsourced an open source equivalent (there are such things) then no hitting a wall. Your outfit can add features any day of the week or freeze it forever.

I have paid a few bucks at most for utilities that scale images (for posting here) and so on. I bought Scrivener long ago ( still a one-time purchase) but never wrote that big book (yet).

Both DarkTable and RawTherapee look worth trying. DarkTable seems like it might just be a reasonable substitute for Lightroom's cataloguing capabilities. (I had a paid "permanent" license to LR that lapsed when Adobe went to their subscription model and tried CaptureOne at that point, but I never really felt comfortable with C1's workflow or features.)

I will definitely try RawTherapee on a couple of troublesome, potentially really good images I've tried to tease into a presentable state.

Agreed on the value proposition of FOSS applications -- I do have a few, most notably OpenOffice, Plex, and Audacity.

But I prefer to keep my images as regular files. I was locked in to iPhoto long ago but it stores files in a tree by date, and I mean each day is a leaf node. Ouch. Gimme my files back. I don't wanna export them.

DigiKam?

I really want a way to categorize photos. Adding names and tags post-facto to many thousands of files is crazy. Ios "search" is a bad joke, though funny at times. It must not live in Google's house of surveillance.

Hope this helps.