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.
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:
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 :)
Did you try darktable? Pretty decent open source alternative to lightroom
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.
Some thoughts on your replies itt:
Pick something and go: you want to move away from capture one, but don’t want to lose the functionality or access to in process edits. Think it over with pen and paper in hand, figure out what you could live without and what you could stand to lose and then choose a piece of software and Just Do It. You’re trying to find a way to keep going the way you’ve been going even though you just said you don’t like it and have prior experience that informed your dislike. Kick the bad habit for yourself.
It’s not as hard as you think: anything on Apple silicon supports running other oses in built in virtualization environment. The thing you feel is too complex literally has first party support. I can say from experience that it works.
You aren’t resilient: it sounds like you don’t have a plan for if your computer were compromised. This is actually a bigger deal than the above. When you get a chance, take the time to figure out how you would recover from some kind of bullshit. It’s worth it.