Lightroom 6 (or similar app) on an M1 MacBook Pro?

[Apple_Glen_UK]

I’d appreciate any help/suggestions with this please.

I am still using Lightroom 6 (standalone version - no subscription) on a 13” MacBook Pro (2015) running Mojave. I am thinking of getting an M1 MacBook Pro. I know that these cannot run Lightroom 6.

I have been using Lightroom 6 for years and my main reason for using it is for cataloguing my photos and videos. I rarely actually do any editing on it. So, I am wondering…

If I got an M1 MBP is there a way of running some sort of Mojave emulator so I could still run Lightroom 6 exactly as I use it now?

Or...

... is there a similar app I could use to catalogue my photos and videos? I have thousands of photos and videos all in chronological order and I want to keep this going. I do not want to sign up to anything with a monthly subscription.

You can probably tell that I am absolutely not an expert on any of this, so any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

 

[Ben J.]

Long time LR user myself, and I'm OK with paying the $18 per month, annual subscription, myself. LR performance on M-series macs and fast SSDs is so fantastic, I thinks it's worth the price. The LR plan includes LR Classic, equivalent to the 'old' LR like LR6, Lightroom (regular) for mobile, and 1TB web storage.

I did a lot of research for a LR alternative when they went subscription, but without much luck. There was really no way to import all my photos, with edits, to a different cataloging app. If you have very little edits, and the organization and sorting part is most important to you, I think there are several alternatives. Maybe even the mac Photos app could work. It also handles video. I have my videos in the mac TV app.

Anyway, I'm sure you'll be amazed at how even the 5 year old M1 will perform compared to the 2015 MBP.

Just my initial thoughts.

(Edit: Oh and I checked 'running LR6 on M1 under Rosetta2' and it seems even though some people have had partial success, most report problems. They say it's due to parts of the LR6 code are 32bit, and other parts are 64bit. Modern macOS is 64bit-only.)

 

[benwiggy]

If I got an M1 MBP is there a way of running some sort of Mojave emulator so I could still run Lightroom 6 exactly as I use it now?

The only option would be a Virtual Machine, running the Mojave OS as an app inside your Mac. But of course Mojave is compiled for Intel CPUs, not Apple Silicon, so any VM would have to emulate (i.e. translate) the Intel code for Apple Silicon.

It is possibly to get this working using something like UTM, but it's likely to be very slow. Painfully so.

I'd suggest that your best course of action is to find an app that can replace Lightroom for cataloguing your files.

Mojave was replaced by Catalina (which no longer supported 32-bit code) in October 2019, and the first M1 Macs were released in November 2020. Progress is made "one funeral at a time", as the saying goes, but standing still isn't a long-term solution, because it just delays the inevitable. (And Rosetta will be removed from the OS in October 2028, so old Intel apps won't run anymore either.)

If I got an M1 MBP

Although the prospects for long-term support of older Apple Silicon are very good (the A18 in the Neo, just released isn't much better than an M1), an M1 is still 5-6 years old. You might want look at secondhand M2s or M3s as well.

 

[benholt]

if you want to avoid the subscription, Capture One is worth looking at - they've had perpetual license options historically, though pricing changes so worth checking their current site. it doesn't share LR's catalog format so you'd reimport your photos fresh, but the raw editing and organization tools are solid. also looked at Darktable (free, open-source) but the UI took some adjustment.

personally I ended up on LR Classic subscription after a lot of resistance. the performance on Apple Silicon is genuinely in a different league - exports that used to take 20 minutes on my old Intel machine are just done. for the volume of work I put through it, the math eventually made sense.

 

[Fishrrman]

OP:

Unless you're willing to pay the monthly subscription...
I'd suggest you start looking around for a replacement for Lightroom...

 

[Apple_Glen_UK]

Thanks to everyone. Plenty to think about and look into. I really appreciate it.