Background: photography is a hobby. I abandoned Adobe Lightroom after 10 years because they’re slime and went to Capture One. But that was dumb, they’re owned by private equity and jacked the price even higher. Now all my edits are in there and I’m stuck.

I found a site with a crack for my specific Mac version. But, I long ago stopped pirating software due to not wanting to install a frigging keylogger. That is not the same as downloading media. I can’t know what a crack is doing.

If you want to send me good sites for recent Mac versions of Capture One, lol hey great. But really, my question is if I’m right that it’s kinda risky to crack software here in 2025.

I hate to pay this scum company again so they can extract rent for another year just to see my own photos.

  • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zipEnglish
    9·
    19 hours ago

    I guess I am confused what what is actually going on.

    All your photos should be stored locally first. It looks like Capture One provides some form of cloud based access if you want to edit with a mobile device but you should still have the raw (possibly RAW format) files yourself?

    So the only thing you are “risking” is your most recent batch of edits that you haven’t exported/finalized yet. So if you are actually a hobbyist… who cares?

    As for whether you should crack it:

    1. If you are relying on cloud storage, this is a deeply stupid idea. They will have logs of your data store being accessed and will have logs of you not having a valid license. A paralegal can pound out the lawsuit over lunch.
    2. If you are less a “hobbyist” and more running a business (what it sounds like): You are inherently playing with fire if you use pirated software for profit. Up to you but my general rule of thumb is that if you are making enough to do something professionally then you are making enough to buy a seat for the industry standard software (or to take the time to learn something jank but cheap)
    • Algernon@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
      1·
      17 hours ago

      Yeah, so it’s subscription software. If you don’t pay yearly, you can’t use it. You need to sign in to activate, just like Adobe Cloud.

      I’m not running a business. I’m just a guy who takes photos.

      Without answering every post individually, people asked why I don’t just switch. If you process digital photos, the edits get saved, so you can change them. It’s like a digital darkroom. I’d lose all that and be left with the unprocessed photos. Hundreds of hours. And, there’s a lot of knowledge and study that went into learning how to do it, so if I switch, I’m starting over with a new app. There are open source ones, but they’re honestly pretty bad. I tried them all.

      The crack blocks the activation server in my hosts file and then patches the app to think it’s activated. You can’t update it then, but I don’t need to.

      My larger question is if that type of crack is just… a risky thing to do from a system security perspective.

      Like… this is a piracy forum. That’s why I’m asking here :)

      • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zipEnglish
        4·
        17 hours ago

        If you process digital photos, the edits get saved, so you can change them. It’s like a digital darkroom. I’d lose all that and be left with the unprocessed photos.

        And you export them when you are finished? So you have the unprocessed photos AND the finalized processed once? And you just have the ones that were in flight that are… in flight.

        But it sounds like you think this is worth using. If you think you understand the crack and understand the risks then go for it? Just understand that piracy of media and games is very different than piracy of productivity software and the risks and liability go up drastically with the latter.

      • paf@jlai.luEnglish
        3·
        17 hours ago

        Did you try darktable? Pretty decent open source alternative to lightroom