How can I migrate my photos from Lightroom 3 to Bibble 5?

Question

I used Lightroom for a while and edited some of my raw photos with it. Since Lightroom is non destructive the changes are not done to the raw images directly.

While using Windows and Linux I looked for a similar software to Lightroom and found Bibble 5 which can be used on both platforms.

The question is how can I migrate my photos including the editings from Lightroom 3 to Bibble 5.

The keywords / tags used in Lightroom aren't so imporant to migrate, because a have a good folder structure and can rebuild them easily, I just don't want to do the visual editings again for every photo.

I have about 700 photos in my Lightroom library (not that big) and they are all NEF (Nikon raw) files.

Answer

Unfortunately there's currently no 'painless/seamless/automated' way to make the switch and you will not be able to pull your files over with edits intact. Your best bet will be to export anything you've made adjustments to as a 16 bit TIFF and then import them into your new chosen application. By keywording the files (with the keywords Adjusted, or Modified, perhaps) and generating sidecar files you will at least be able to sort them by keyword once you've got them out of Lightroom.

Obviously there's no way to know what products will be released in the future that have the potential to make the transition more seamless, but speaking as someone who spent a number of years in the software industry 'in another life,' my personal opinion is that I wouldn't hold my breath waiting, 'cause you will likely never see this transition be made any easier by Adobe... It's just not in the companies best interest or bottom line to make it easy to shift to a competing product, so there's just no real incentive to spend a lot of development time there...

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