Comment by aftbit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aftbit | Hacker News Reader

>When Apple introduced El Cap, it deprecated iPhoto in favor of Photos. Photos is missing a crucial piece of functionality: the ability to export an album as a web page. Apple wants you to share your photos using iCloud. Well, I don't want to use iCloud. I run my own server, and I want to share my photos there.

I'm frequently bothered by the shockingly anti-competitive nature of software today. Walled gardens and lock-in are pretty terrifying. If you want to continue to control your data, you can't trade control of it away to a software company for convenience and a shiny user interface.

My collection of music managed by beets[1] (and properly id3 tagged) will never be inaccessible to me because all of the data formats are open and standard. If I were using iTunes, perhaps that would someday be untrue.

I'm not a big photos person - do any awesome FOSS photo management programs exist?

[1] https://beets.readthedocs.org/en/latest/guides/main.html

> If I were using iTunes, perhaps that would someday be untrue.

That's simply not true. The iTunes store sells DRM-free AAC, a documented format. You can transcode it into literally any other format, if you don't like AAC. Ripped CDs are ripped to the format of your choice.

Only the Apple Music streaming service uses DRM - and buying a DRM-free version of any track is literally one click away.

I can think of many things to criticise Apple for, but lock-in of your music is not one of them.

In fairness, Apple used to encode most of the music they sold with FairPlay. Many people probably assume they still do.

That was over 7 years ago. How is it "fair" that people don't know?

Because why would they know? Unless they saw it in a news article, most people probably never heard about the change.

How about when iTunes randomly starts moving music off your local drive and onto the cloud. This has happened to me for songs not purchased through iTunes, and without me knowingly enabling this "feature".

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6475923?tstart=0

Where is the anti-competitive behaviour in this? It is not that you cannot export your photos, it just does not have a feature to make a gallery with one click. Your note abou iTunes is also off the mark.

Many have open-source photo managers have come and gone but imo Digikam is still the best. It's not perfect, but probably the most robust, and one of the few that has shown it can survive the gauntlet and keep users around for years at a time.

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