Capture One to Discontinue Capture One Express

Capture One has announced that the company is discontinuing the free tier of its software, Capture One express. The software will no longer be available to download after January 31st, 2024.

In a note on the company’s user forum, they announced that from January 31st, Capture One express will cease to exist. Not only will the software no longer be available to download, but the company will stop activating existing license keys. In another area of the forum, they state that:

“All Capture One Express license keys will be disabled after January 30, 2024. To continue using Capture One, you'll need a license key for a current product, such as Capture One Pro.”

And later on that page they say:

Can I run Capture One Express on an old computer? No, all Capture One Express license keys will be disabled and will not be valid, regardless of the hardware used.

So it appears that the software will stop working completely on that date.

According to Capture One, the company made this decision to focus our efforts on our core products, such as Capture One Pro and mobile apps.”

If you use Capture One express, I strongly suggest you export any edited images as either Tiff files or Jpegs to bake in your edits and make a backup of your raw files.

While I understand why they might want to discontinue the software, killing it completely with such a short lead in time seems a bit of a crappy move. By comparison, Apple Aperture, which Apple killed years ago, still works on a compatible computer. I just don’t understand why they can’t simply say they’re no longer going to update it. To kill it completely like this seems excessive and a little bit desperate. I know this is free software, but it costs them nothing to just not update it. It seems like something an accounting firm would do to try to balance books.

Again, to be clear, I have no problem with them discontinuing the software, they are a business after all. But to deactivate it and kill it with a little over a month’s notice is unnecessarily aggressive. I have to say, between the changes to the perpetual licensing earlier this year, and now this, I’m becoming more and more disillusioned with Capture One as a company.