Lightroom alternatives
Photo editing: exposure, colour, curves and presets.
5 of its 6 core features can be rebuilt with AI. Here is one, working, below.
- They makeRevenue estimate on Sensor Tower
- $5M a month
- You pay
- $50 a year
- AI can rebuild
- 5 of 6 core features
Try it
Visual demo only. Copy the prompt below to get the app.
Build it yourself
Real files on your machine, a real database, and it is yours. This one carries the interface as well — the layout, the colours and the shape of the real app, read off its own screens.
Each opens with the prompt loaded and waiting — nothing is sent until you press enter. It is copied at the same time, in case the app is not installed.
Build me a local photo editor I own, to replace Lightroom. - A web app I run on my own machine: Node and Express serving one page, sharp and libvips doing the pixels, better-sqlite3 for the catalogue. - Catalogue a folder without moving or rewriting anything: index files, read EXIF with exiftool, hash for duplicates, cache previews. - Model it properly: photos, and a versioned edit row of parameters per photo, so every export re-renders from the original. - Tone and colour in linear light: exposure, contrast, highlights and shadows with a luminance-masked rolloff, whites, blacks, temperature, tint, vibrance, saturation, a curve as a lookup table, per-hue adjustment. - Presets are rows of those same parameters, so saving one is copying an edit. - Raw through libraw, not the few cameras a browser will decode. - Masking: a local segmentation model, rembg or similar, downloaded once and needing no key, for subject and background, plus a hue and luminance range for skies. Masks are parameters, not bitmaps. - One command to export a selection at a chosen size and quality, one to back up the catalogue. - Binds to localhost only. No accounts, no telemetry, nothing uploaded. - Skip: cross-device sync and client galleries. That is storage somebody pays for every month. - Include a README with setup, installing exiftool and libraw, and where the catalogue lives. ## Look and feel Lightroom's own — near-black, the photo almost full screen, thin sliders underneath with the value beside each, a light blue accent on the active control. Generous spacing, clear hierarchy, big tap targets, phone-readable type, system font. Keep the text dark enough to read at a glance: the softness of a palette belongs to the shapes and the fills, never to the words. Nothing I need to read — dates, numbers, labels — in pale grey on white.
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Feature by feature
Every feature, whether AI can rebuild it, and what you would be signing up to keep running if you did. The paid app does that last column for you, and that is most of what the money buys.
| Feature | Core | AI can rebuild | You'd maintain |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tone sliders: exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites and blacksThis is the whole of what most people do to a photo, and all of it is arithmetic on pixels the browser already runs for free. | Yes | Yes | Nothing |
| Colour: temperature, tint, vibrance and saturation | Yes | Yes | Nothing |
| Tone curve and per-colour mixerA curve is a lookup table and the colour mixer is the same maths applied to one hue at a time. Neither needs anything the page does not have. | Yes | Yes | Nothing |
| Presets, and saving your own | Yes | Yes | You would build your own set instead of buying somebody's |
| Crop, straighten and rotate | Yes | Yes | Nothing |
| AI masking: select the sky, the subject or the backgroundPainting a mask by hand is easy. Knowing which pixels are sky is the part Adobe trained a model for, and it is the reason the app feels clever. | Yes | No | Needs a model that can tell what is in the photo |
| Healing and spot removalCopying nearby pixels over a blemish works fine. Filling in a whole removed object convincingly does not. | No | Partly | Nothing |
| Cloud sync across phone, tablet and desktopStorage and bandwidth somebody has to pay for every month, which no prompt changes. | No | No | You would keep track of your own files |
| Raw files from a real camera | No | Partly | Browsers only read raw from some cameras |
What you give up
- selecting the sky or the subject with one tap
- your edits following you onto a laptop
- the preset packs other photographers spent months tuning
- raw files from a proper camera opening reliably
Why people still pay
The sliders are decades-old maths and a browser runs all of them. What Adobe sells is the model that knows which pixels are sky, and a copy of every photo waiting on the desktop when you get home.
Or use one somebody already built
Free and open source. No prompt, no building, no subscription.
- Darktable
- A full raw developer, free forever, with curves and masks that go further than Lightroom's. Desktop only, and it expects you to learn it. (windows, macos, linux)
- Snapseed
- Google's phone editor, free with no subscription and no watermark, including selective adjustments and healing. (ios, android)
- Photopea
- A photo editor that runs in a browser tab, free with ads, and never uploads your image anywhere. (web)
Other apps people are freeing
Questions
- Can AI really replace Lightroom?
- 5 of its 6 core features, yes. The demo above is what one prompt produced. What it cannot do is on this page too.
- What does Lightroom cost?
- About $50 a year on the Lightroom Premium plan. Editing on your phone with the basic sliders and presets is free. Healing, masking, cloud sync, premium presets and raw files from a camera are Premium.
- Is there a free alternative to Lightroom?
- Yes: Darktable, Snapseed, Photopea. They are listed below, and they are somebody else's finished work rather than yours.