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.
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.