Every tool says it respects your work. The question is whether it is true when you try to leave.
We made a decision early, and it shapes everything else: CMP owns nothing. Your files remain yours. Your folders remain yours. Your metadata remains yours. Picks, rejects and ratings are written as portable XMP sidecars that travel straight into Lightroom, Capture One or DxO. There is no master catalog holding your archive hostage, no proprietary library you have to copy into, no cloud that quietly becomes the only place your work lives.
Delete CMP tomorrow, reconnect your drives, and nothing breaks. That is the test. Trust that cannot survive your departure was never trust — it was lock-in with better copywriting.
This is not only an ethical stance; it is the first stone of something longer. An archive that can be carried anywhere can survive any tool. An archive that survives can be passed on — to the editor you switch to in two years, to a collaborator, to the version of you who returns to this work a decade from now.
> Trust is not a promise on a pricing page. It is the shape of the data when you walk away.
So we build the exit into the product on purpose. Not because we want you to leave — but because a tool you are free to leave is the only kind worth staying with.