Review of the year 2025
Today is the annual review for 2025 and again it is very warm at the turn of the year, but there has also been a lot of rain, in some areas too much and even a little bit of snow the last couple days.
First of all, I wish all my visitors to the blog all the best for the year 2026 and, above all, that you have a good start to the New Year. The blog is now in its 12th year with many contributions, particularly on the topics of photography, video and IT.
So far I’ve still managed to publish one post per week and also a few videos on my YouTube channel. In total there were almost 1,390 published articles, mainly around the topics of photos, videos and of course IT.
The IT area takes up a lot of space because I try out a lot and now host a lot of things myself. Unfortunately, when it comes to photography, news is limited. There are a few new features in the programs and the new camera introductions are no longer that big.
But it started in 2025 with the AstrHori 25mm/2.8 macro lens, which offers image ratios between 2:1 and 5:1. The lens is relatively good for the price and I can’t judge whether 65mm/2.8 macro, for example, would offer better imaging performance.
In practical handling it only turned out that the required minimum distances when stacking cannot be achieved with a normal setting slide. That’s why a Novoflex Castel M was introduced, which, with its special mechanics, ensures that these minimum distances can be maintained repeatably from shot to shot.
A bigger leap was the purchase of a Macbook Pro in February, which replaced the previously used Macbook Ar. The jump was already enormous, because the MacBook Pro with M4 Pro CPU and 24 GB RAM can (almost) keep up with my Windows PC in terms of rendering times, which is equipped with an i7-14700.
Since then I have been using the Macbook for DaVinci REsolve or Lightroom or Photoshop.
But that also has to do with the fact that I found an option to switch back and forth between Windows and MacOS at will. This can be done with a few scripts and adapting the Lightroom catalog, which is nothing more than an SQLite database. This has now proven itself, although I have moved away from FreefileSync for synchronization and use rsync. Of course, it would be much easier if Adobe provided such a change natively, as is the case in DaVinci REsolve, for example.
Space was slowly becoming scarce in my self-built NAS, so I decided to replace the 6x4TB disks running there with 3 16TB disks. The migration and import of the ZFS pool worked very well, so a little research was all I needed.
Since my 4 TB NVMe for my photos was now almost full, I decided to use a ready-made NAS. It became the UGreen DXP 4800+ with a total of 4 bays. Of course, if I had built it myself I would have had more freedom in choosing the components, but given the costs for the board, RAM, etc., the finished solution was even cheaper.
Even if the UGreen DXP4800+ is of course not perfect, I am overall satisfied with it so far.
Then of course there were several updates for software, including Lightroom Classic. Here I found the May update with the landscape masks to be a really outstanding update. And of course others like DaVinci Resolve have also delivered quite impressive updates for Da Vinci Resolve, for example. And as an alternative to take a look, I tried ON1 Photo RAW 2026.
And at the end of the year I swapped my Lumix S5, which I wanted to keep as a second camera, for a Lumix S9. The background was simply that the Lumix S9 is much closer to the Lumix S5 IIx than the Lumix S5. This is especially true for autofocus. But the other features also made the decision for the small camera easy.
That was basically the year 2025 and many smaller events remain unmentioned in this article.
All in all, a very eventful year 2024. I hope you enjoyed the articles and stay with the blog as loyal readers.
ciao tuxoche
