Been ‘kicking the tires’ on Apple Photos since the MPU Episode #537 and have found it utterly frustrating.
I don’t want iCloud to be the ‘source of truth’ for MY photo collection. I want MY photo collection and how I organize it to be the source of truth and Photos/iCloud as a back up and a facilitator to deliver/access/discover photos on all my devices. That is a small but key difference.
Then you don’t want iCloud Photos. Try something else - Google Photos, Flickr, Smugmug, Adobe. (I’ve never signed on to iCloud Photos.)
No worries, I’ve tried/evaluated many of the offerings out there and actively use Google Photos but even that has its gaps and issues. If they had kept Picasa desktop app, and upgraded it, I think they would have the perfect solution. I wish they would have open sourced Picasa or something to let someone else update if they were not going to do so.
After hearing #537, I thought Apple Photos may have turned a corner but alas, I may have to agree that it is not going to work. May take a closer look at Lightroom again.
If you want your photo collection structure (folders, etc.) to be the source of truth, Lightroom CC is also not for you. Once you have things imported into it, you can create folders and such, but you can’t import a whole directory structure into it from the get go.
Don’t forget that there are TWO Lightrooms you get from Adobe, and you can use Lightroom Classic on your Mac to be ‘source of truth’ while having Adobe’s cloud (either 20Gb storage or 1Tb storage, depending on the Creative Cloud Plan you choose) storage, sharing and presentation capabilities too.
I’ve been using iphotos/photos for too long to change and welcome this thorough guide to improve my photo management skills. Sorry if I missed this explanation, but are there OS/version minimums to this field guide? I ask as my imac is limited to 10.13 High Sierra (Photos 3.0), and my iphone 7 is at 13.5.1. Didn’t see that info at macsparky.com.
If you want the photo collection structure to be “the source of truth” you can do so with both Photos (by unchecking Preferences–>General–>Importing–>Copy items to the Photos library) and with Lightroom Classic (Add top level folder and then do a Synchronize). And there is no need to use the cloud with either of them.
Right. I use Photos for my iPhone images, merely copying them over periodically from my phone by cable, then deleting them from the phone.
I use Lightroom Classic with Photoshop on the Mac, but with that subscription you also get Lightroom CC/Mac which is great on iOS (the subscription also fully unlocks all option in the iOS Photoshop Express editor. Lightroom CC can sync images between the Mac/iOS Lightroom CC apps, and offers nice additional features like web storage and attractive Adobe-hosted web galleries for sharing publicly via Adobe Portfolio (included in the subscription).
Lightroom on iOS will sync to Lightroom Classic on the Mac (via their cloud). I actually use that and haven’t bothered with Lightroom CC. I’ve found this much faster and basically more reliable than when I used Apple’s My Photo Stream. Adobe’s cloud I only take advantage of for this transfer.
Interesting. I only use my Adobe cloud storage for temporarily sharing small galleries of timely iPhone images to friends. (Sometime I use Google Photos for that too - no particular rhyme or reason.)
Since I semi-arbitrarily decided years ago to relegate iPhoto for my camera pics and Lightroom/Classic for ‘real’ camera photos I don’t need a sync from CC to Classic on the Mac, but it’s a useful thing to know about!
Frequently on photo trips these (pre-COVID) days I’d use my “serious” DSLR as well as my iPhone and I like to merge them together. So I want everything to end up in one place.
I shoot RAW exclusively on my ‘good’ cameras and until just recently iPhone didn’t do RAW. (Even now, the malleability of the RAW files are not particularly pliable in comparison, and dealing with RAW-to-jpg when I want to Message images is too annoying to regularly use RAW on my iPhone today.) So I decided years ago to keep Lightroom for the RAW files and resort to iPhoto for the camerpics.
I could put everything into Lightroom, but the separation, of image type and quality, works out.
Hi there, I enjoyed the episode and signed up for the Field guide and working through it ! I heard Stephen say that he has a smart album for all photos not set to albums and I’d really like to do that but can’t find out how !! Can’t find it in the Field Guide either. Please could Stephen explain ?
Thanks
As far as I can tell, following Smart Album shows all photos and videos that aren’t currently in any albums. It could be further refined to only show photos that aren’t in at least one album.
I hope this helps!
Just finished going through the Photos Field Guide. I have always had a my own Photo workflow system, but I am always curious to learn something new and different.
My current photo system - I have referenced it in other areas of this forum, but long story, short. They all sit on my Synology.
DSLR Photos
Photos > YYYY > YYYY-MM-DD Event Name
Mobile Photos
Photos > Family Member Name > YYYY > YYYY-MM-DD Event Name
All of these folders would these be dropped into Lightroom (I started in 2014) where I would add tags, keywords, etc.
Advantage
Disadvantage
The field guide from @MacSparky is well-made and documented. I hadn’t touched Photos App in such a long time. So many great and automatic features!
As mentioned by other posters and by David as well. My issues with Photos are three-fold.
I just got back from a trip and I want to share some 100 photos and a few videos with two other people who are not on Apple devices.
How do I go about doing that best? We usually just share through Facebook Messenger, but it’s not always that fast and sharing longer videos especially takes a long time.
You can share albums in iCloud with anyone.
Also look into creating an album in Google Photos, and sharing the album link. You can make the album (or all photos) private, and you can later revoke viewing privileges if you want.
Which app do you use to process them? Which app do you use to take the RAW photos?
