> Sometime in early 2019 check out Skylum Luminar. They’re coming out with a Lightroom analogue that’s not subscription based.

Thanks, I hadn't seen that before. Two things put me off though:

1.) Lightroom really has motivated me to find an open source replacement. I don't think I want to get locked into another proprietary solution.

2.) The landing page for Luminar 3 that I found was so full of marketing hyperbole that I choked. There was a ton of fluff IDGAF about (e.g. export to 500px, "foliage enhancer" filter, Apple photos extensions, soft glow, artificial intelligence filter) and some that just felt like easily misinterpreted stuff (e.g. details enhancer filter, workspaces, polarizing filter).

If there's a trial I may check it out, but I'd want to know more about the tech details. Adobe got a few things right that I doubt other proprietary solutions will. Making LR so extensible with Lua is huge (is the core written in Lua?), storing its catalog in a relatively easy to parse SQLite db as well makes it easy enough to interoperate. As much as I kvetch about migrating from LR to DT, I think writing a module to import the LR metadata seems like an ideal first attempt at hacking on DT project.