Is Luminar worth the time spent in fixing issues ?
I downloaded Luminar about a month back and ever since then it has been a never-ending sequence of issues. It actually worked perfectly until I did this suggested update (about 3 weeks back). That was the last known time when Luminar was actually functional. The issues I have had were as follows:
1) Photos disappeared from folders ... I thought Luminar was not supposed to edit photos on disk ... maybe it happened when I had 'imported' the items. In any case I copied the pictures back to the folder and restarted Luminar. The photo count still had 0;
2) Used AppCleaner as recommended and re-installed Luminar with no success;
3) Used a more involved method suggested by Support which actually seemed to fix the problem, but then a new one resurfaced - I could no longer scroll through the images sequentially, it started skipping and even re-organising images at random;
4) I came to know that it had No Geolocation support ... your geolocation EXIF is practically unusable (if it isn't the case, please advise); and
5) I believe there is no way to import from phone (eg., iPhone IoS, Android, etc). In Lightroom, all you have to do is connect your phone, LR detects the new photos and you import. In Luminar, I have had to manually copy images to a folder by exporting from Mac Photos.
All this also means that you have to maintain a Duplicate copy of your images ! One set in Apple Photos and other in Luminar ?!
-----
The primary of all of these issues is the case of 0 photos and now skipping photos ...
Luminar Support has been trying to assist, but their email-only method of solving issues as a new firm with a challenging product is regrettable ... they will end up losing more customers and goodwill in the long run. These issues will make its way to broader communities that are considering Luminar unless there is a more proactive assistance
When a new product enters the market there will undoubtedly be unexpected issues - to that end, I was willing to give Luminar the benefit of the doubt. I have spent hours trying to get these to work, exchanged several mails with support and yet its non-existent phone/chat assistance, long turnaround times, lack of important photographer features together with new and newer issues and unstable / destabilising updates makes it a very unreliable bargain. Is it really worth spending all this time trying to get something to work with a firm that is not efficient, doesn't appear to do the necessary testing before releasing updates to an entire community and is at a stage where it definitely could do with more proactive user assistance.
-
Hi Raj, thanks for sharing your honest opinion with us, we listened to every single word you wrote here. At the moment, we're working on our major update that is scheduled for the end of Spring - Luminar 3.1.0, it's faster and it's more stable. Have you tested Luminar Flex? It doesn't have the Library module, which makes it a rather fast plugin.
Please sign in to leave a comment.
Comments
3 comments