Taking a break from open source

I’m taking a break from open source. Not forever, probably. But for now, I’m stepping away from active maintenance of my projects, and I want to be honest about why.

The reality of solo maintenance

Building something other people find useful feels great. The first time someone opens an issue to say “this saved me hours,” it genuinely makes your day. I built the Lightroom Immich Plugin to scratch my own itch, and it turned out a lot of other people had the same itch.

But solo open source maintenance has a pattern that wears you down slowly.

You ship something. People use it. Then the requests start. More features, more edge cases, better documentation, support for this version of that app. The issue tracker fills up. Some requests are thoughtful and come with repro steps. Others are just “why doesn’t it do X?” with no context.

That’s fine — users are users, and users ask questions. What gets exhausting is the ratio. Hundreds of people benefit from the project. A handful take the time to report a clear bug. Almost nobody opens a pull request.

I don’t say this to shame anyone — contributing code to someone else’s project takes real effort, and most users are not developers. I get it. But when you’re the only person doing the work and the queue of requests keeps growing, it stops feeling like a hobby and starts feeling like a second job you don’t get paid for.

What I’m doing about it

For now: stepping back. I won’t be actively developing new features or monitoring issues day-to-day.

Existing releases continue to work as they do today. The code isn’t going anywhere — it’s on GitHub, so anyone who wants to fork and continue development is welcome to do so.

If something is broken in a future Lightroom or Immich release I’ll do my best to notice eventually, but I can’t promise quick turnaround.

If you want the projects to continue

The best thing you can do is contribute. I’m not asking for perfect code or senior engineering — even small things help:

• A clear bug report with reproduction steps
• A PR that fixes something, even if rough around the edges
• Documentation improvements
• Helping answer questions in the issue tracker

If enough people show up wanting to move the project forward, I’ll be there to review and merge. Open source works best when it’s actually collaborative.

Thanks

To everyone who has opened a thoughtful issue, sent a kind message, or contributed anything at all — thank you. You’re the reason the project got as far as it did.

I’ll be back when I feel like building again.