Why I am switching back to LR after 6 years...

To chime in with the others who are posted about it, here are my main gripes about CaptureOne, a software that I applaud for it's interface, I never encountered any serious bug, so it's not that...

Scenario is that my wife is a heavy photoshop user. I can get LR+PS for less than C1. But it's not just about the money buying Z9, Z8 and lenses easily dwarfs the cost of the software. 

I am on a Mac Studio. Months ago (5?) I filed bugs about the bad performance of C1 on this kind of system. I come back from a shoot with 2000 images, and my machine imports this in C1. The machine is chilling, no CPU, no GPU. It takes nearly an hour. I do the same in LR - a factor > 10 faster. That's bad.

In C1 in the last year I got a lot of gimmicks as feature. In LR I get auto mask and denoise that are actually worth using. 

My wife get's an Z8. Guess how well tethered shooting is working...

I can live with no auto mask (although seriously, that saves so much time). I can live with no good denoising (I have topaz denies for that). I can not really live with the shitty performance and the bugs in tethered shooting. That's the bread & butter of a pro app - be fast and reliable. C1 is not that anymore. 

Then I start to investigate switching. And now I get really upset. I can go from LR to C1 easily. LR supports XMP files, all my edits are there, I just import that into C1. Not the other way round. C1 is a walled garden, a closed shop. Once you are in there, they don't want you to get out. That makes me a tiny bit mad.

Then there is the whole catalog vs session thing. When I switched so many years ago, it made perfect sense. But these days, LR can handle million of photos with no real slowdown. I imported (as a test) 60K photos into C1 and it took several hours (> 5). LR did the same in < 1h. And when using LR, it is fast and responsive, C1 is sluggish. That's on a very, very fast SSD. C1 support always tells you: you need the proper setup, fast etc. I am on a MacStudio. It does not get any faster on Macs. And it was the same on a AMD thread ripper with a 3090 Nvidia. The software is just build badly, with no real consideration to multiprocessor performance. 

There is no roadmap on when performance get's addressed. Instead I get ton's of YT videos about the stupid iPad app. The focus is all wrong. I went to C1 years ago because I considered Adobe to the a money press that does not care about users, and C1 being a pro oriented choice. Times have changed, by now C1 feels like an app that is just trying to leech cash for little value. 

Anyhow. I am not done evaluating the cost of moving 100k+ photos from C1 to LR. So I might stay, maybe I am too lazy. But, I really doubt it. The auto mask and the ability to have everything in just one catalog is winning me over.

Frank