I ditched the Adobe Lightroom setup a while back because I was looking for a cheaper method.
What I now use , and something that may work for your is Canon's own DPP program. (Free). I'm fairly well organised in terms of the initial saving / storing my images. I take them from the SD card, and place them into folders named:
YYYY MM DD - Description of Content
i.e.
2019 07 15 - Holiday in Skye
Then within DPP, I can simply browse the folder structures, and on selecting a folder, can see all the thumbnails pop up. Each image can be edited within DPP which is decent but not as advanced as lightroom, however the lens correction stuff is very good I think.
You can also easily flag, rate and star images and create collections within DPP. You can search / filter by those ratings etc, but I'm not sure about whether you can add keywords that can be searched later like you could in LR. That being said, I've never needed that because I can find images fairly quickly just by the naming structure I use for the folders. I reckon I would spend more time trying to keyword stuff than actuallyjust browsing to the folder. A neat thing I find is that the adjustments of RAW files seem to get stored back into the RAW file when saved, no messing with catalogue files.
Overall, its decent enough, a little quirky, a little slower in its responsiveness and adjustments being applied, but does compare favourably in terms of image quality with RAW files versus other programs. However, it does have limits, which for me I needed to get past. For example, adding gradient adjustments and fancier colour effects that the likes of Lightroom offered. My choice for the further image editing has become Affinity Photo ( its an alternative to Photoshop ). Single purchase program again (£50, but often on offer if you wait for deals), and plenty of updates with that single purchase ... and at this time, no obvious declaration of wanting to change for updated versions either. Affinity photo lets me do all the photoshop stuff that you could want to do.
So for my workflow, save to folder, browse rate and do basic edits within Canon DPP and batch process out to whatever. If there are ones which I need to edit beyond basic stuff, I can open the file directly in Affinity folder, adjust the RAW file and then do the photoshop type stuff to it, and then export it out from there.
Its not quite as slick as the Adobe workflow and there are a few more steps, however, its no where near as expensive ... a one off payment for Affinity, and thats it. I've saved a fortune over the last year.
