Free, open-source alternatives to Adobe Lightroom

Lightroom combines a photo catalogue with a RAW development workspace, where edits to exposure, colour, detail and lens corrections are stored as instructions instead of changing the original file. The open-source apps below cover the same job of organising and developing your own RAW files.

darktable pairs a nondestructive editing pipeline with its own library and tagging. digiKam comes at it from the catalogue side, with albums, tags, face recognition and metadata search for large collections, plus RAW import and an image editor. RawTherapee concentrates on detailed development and batch export without a full catalogue, and Redlamp is an early-stage developer whose panels follow Lightroom's Develop workspace closely.