I listen to the ATP podcast. Recently they had a member’s special that covered Photo Library Management. Before I pay their membership fee, does anyone know they discuss anything beyond Photos?
Currently I have massive Lightroom library and it’s causing friction in the family since it is effectively gatekeeping access to the family photo library.
I wanted to hear if they talked about choices and tradeoffs.
Which Lightroom? Lightroom Classic or Lightroom Cloud (desktop, mobile and web)?
Raw, DNG, JPEG, HEIC, or something else?
Have you tried exporting a standard version (JPEG) of each photo in your library to a shared drive or shared cloud location for access and use by all?
The other thing that I haven’t sorted through. I shoot heaps using my iPhone these days and I love how Photos has widgets that get these to appear everywhere in life.
I was hoping that ppl with a mix of DSLR/Phone who’re also heavy Apple users would have a good discussion, illuminating angles I hadn’t considered.
I hope I’m not violating some membership NDA or anything, but they basically talked about Casey’s totally convoluted workflow for moving photos around and adding geo location data and then each person’s likes/dislikes and workflows using Apple photos.
No real discussion of any alternative catalog or photo management systems.
Their talk about shared and family photo libraries was centered around how that force-fit those capabilities into existing Apple Photos features, or lack thereof.
Count me there. I haven’t found any ideal solution.
Best advice I’ve seem is to arbitrarily decide where the “source of truth” library will reside (either in Lightroom, Apple Photos, or some other system), and then use various workflows and conventions to mirror all or a subset into Apple Photos.
Clever use of one-way sync to keep the “master library” from being polluted and human convention (with all the issues that entails) is about the only thing I’ve found that almost works.
For me and family, assuming Apple Photos is casual and throw-away library, and anything permanent has to be copied some else (Adobe Lightroom Cloud for me), means each family member has full control over their Apple eco-system use of photos without any special intervention or workflow to worry about.
Depending on the volume of photos (some family members rarely take photos, some take tons), their either explicitly send the “keepers” to me to file away or I periodically take their device and copy the keepers on their behalf.
Years ago I exported all my iPhone pictures from iPhoto and imported them into Lightroom Classic as JPEGs. I stopped using iPhoto as a repository. Anything that I shoot today on my iPhone XS and that I want to keep, gets AirDrop’d to my Mac and loaded into my Pictures folder in an existing dated structure as folders named with the pattern ccyy/mm-dd. For instance today’s Picture folders for “October 6, 2024” would be 2024/10-06.
My raw photos (.NEF and .RAF) get imported into the same folder structure after each session. Once they have been edited I export full-sized but rather modest-quality JPEGs to a separate 2024 folder (no subfolder structure but I have renamed my photos on import with CaptureDate-Camera-OriginalFileNumber).
A copy of any JPEGs/HEICs from my iPhone are also placed in the 2024 folder. It is this yearly folder of JPEGs that I’m suggesting could be shared, for example, via Dropbox.
Well you saved me some $$ and gave me some ideas - so thanks.