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