RapidRAW 1.5 – The Open Source Lightroom Competitor
More mature, but not yet all grown-up
Note: I often leave stuff out of reviews on YouTube to try and keep the run-times as reasonable as possible – so think of this as the director’s cut!
I
n June 2025 I saw a Reddit post about a brand new open source Lightroom-style RAW editor being created by a young Swiss developer. It looked really promising so I hopped on YouTube to see what everyone had to say about the app and was surprised to discover that there was absolutely no coverage at all, anywhere. From reading the details on Github it looked like a promising new app, so I downloaded, tested and reviewed it on my YouTube channel.
The video proved popular enough that it’s fair to say RapidRAW had landed at exactly the right cultural moment. Photographers were restless, Adobe’s pricing was getting worse, and here was this young bloke quietly building something that might actually provide a viable free alternative to Lightroom.
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Also published in RAW & Unfiltered on Substack.
