Is Affinity working on a Lightroom competitor? Chances are looking very good

 

 

As amazing as Adobe Lightroom is and what it can do, it has been on the receiving end of complaints from users for the better part of three years now, with intermittant updates from the software behemoth doing little to fix the often slow nature of the photo management and bulk adjustments application. Add to that the influx of updates to Lightroom Mobile instead of the main desktop platform, which caters to arguably a completley different audience than the main program, and you have the ingredients to a rather dissatisfied user base.

Here is just a small sample of complaints from Twitter (which are echoed in every online photo community just about daily). The one tweet from 2012 was included on purpose: this has been an ongoing issue. 

The thing is, as much as folks speak out against the program, it's probably easily the most-used organization and batch-editing platform for photos out there simply because of its intuitive design, ease of use and maybe simply because it's what everyone is used to using. For that, folks tolerate slow. Some may have moved to Capture One, but aside from that excellent (albeit expensive) editor there are scant few other options for the advanced amatuer to professional. 

It's why when we hear Affinity is working on a digital asset manager, it qualifies as news. 

Serif, Affinity's developer, has made great strides in the photo editing software world, with an InDesign competitor and the well-known Photoshop Competitor that recently came fully-fledged to iPad. Affinity gets a lot right and keeps getting better with each iteration. At first they weren't quite ready to take on the giant that is Adobe, but through repeated updates and expanded feature sets, they've created a platform that works extremely well. If they were to create a digital asset manager that includes editing like Lightroom (which might be a stretch just based on their tweet; for all we know, it could just be like Bridge), Adobe may finally show concern enough to fix the speed issues that users have been complaining about since 2012. 

If not, then perhaps Affinity's soon-to-come asset manager will be enough to get more people's attention. What do you think? If Affinity came out with a program akin to Lightroom, would you switch?