40k photos going back to 2009
Managed by Lightroom I’d imagine? That’s a massive amount of files do you photograph professionally?
Managed by Lightroom I’d imagine? That’s a massive amount of files do you photograph professionally?
Still in Aperture (unfortunately.) I don’t love Lightroom; maybe the subscription model would be tolerable if the software were snappier; so I’m thinking about migrating to Capture One, and breaking up the catalog by years. Aperture’s ability to manage large catalogs (and the terrific map views) will be missed.
And no, not a professional. A professional would never fool around with keeping and backing up so much data!
A photographer friend keeps everything in Lightroom but uses Capture One because its tethering is superior. He says he thinks he could switch over completely to Capture One if he had to, but since he still needs to go into Photoshop he’s paying for Lightroom anyway, and all his historical edits are in Lightroom… so he’s staying put.
I use the Nik Software plugin collection on a regular basis, especially Silver Efex Pro, and the integration with Lightroom keeps me there and I couldn’t consider Capture One, as good as it is, without similar plugin support.
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120k in photos and videos. Personal plus client photos. I find Photos a useful daily asset manager/editor for work images - Current client assets I keep in Photos, any lapsed clients I offload to cloud-only Dropbox. Each Apple device has a full set of full res images synced. I worry about trusting everything to this one app, so run backups to a rotation of offline portable SSDs periodically, as well as running Backblaze. Am curious about whether others worry / how others manage this. I use tagging heavily, but not albums - even the Smart ones seem dumb, have had problems with them unfortunately. I wish Apple would upspec Photos even more - capacity to run separate actual Libraries without hard re-booting to a different Library on Mac, ability to fully apply and access metadata on iOS, weird ghosting thing with old albums that pops up in photo-accessing apps, I could go on. But, with various compromises and hacks, it’s a total miracle to be able to manage all these visual assets on the go with such freedom and speed.
Mine is 42,903 with 663 videos. I recently transferred the entire library to an external SSD and it made all the difference in the world, performance-wise.
I’m at a mere 2200 photos. not much of a photographer. 
16,281 in Photos
10,001 in Aperture
Very slowly working on culling the collections though. I’d really like for Photos to have the ability to filter to “all photos taken on this day, regardless of year” which would allow me to open it up each day, filter down to “today”, and perform some housekeeping. 5-10 minutes a day, after a year I’d have a much tidier library.
That’s the thing, I wish Photos would offer advanced options to enable if you want to but not have them default enabled to not overwhelm people.
How much space does your 120k images take up and what is it stored on?
Agreed, @Jonathan_Davis. I’d also like it to be friendlier to create and manage shared libraries, so I can auto-share photo assets with artists who work remotely to me. The current clunky lower-res Apple-ecosystem-only thing is not very workable. Assets live in iCloud, with full library in iPhone XS, 11” iPad Pro, and MBP. (Although it claims they’re full files, I see a little bit of file loading when I click to edit a full image, hmm). But I still haven’t found a better solution that suits my needs (Big Girl photographer style options aren’t for me). Backups are in Backblaze, a 2Tb full Time Machine SSD, and a couple of image-only SSDs that rotate around and get manually backed up periodically with only the Photo Library. Because, iCloud looks 0.0001% suspicious to me, and it’d be really tiresome to have to go out and take all those pictures all over again 
. Am I doing it right anyone - smarter solutions / workflows out there?
Hey finally responding @GreenGreenGrass! I think your strategy is understandable. I took like being able to look at photos and reference them when out and about. I think your smart about the various backups. For backing up if you don’t already I would use CarbonCopyCloner, makes things easy to automate and backup upon connecting.
I guess the only thing I don’t like about your system is that if iCloud were to be corrupted. Let me take a look around the forums to see if there are any other useful threads regarding this.
Here are some threads that might prove useful. Also might be worth posting in its own thread your question regarding photo workflows/solutions.
Here are the threads:
26,500 on my server for viewing. This is after removing all those not worth showing. On the input side there is 300GB of RAW files, and 129GB of scanned files (mainly slides but also negatives and prints) dating back to over 70 years.
Nothing is in the cloud except as one of the backup destinations.
I’ve basically completed my migration out of Aperture, to Capture One Pro – at least in terms of workflow. The old Aperture Library still needs to be migrated to referenced, such that if I need to revisit an old photo that can happen without Aperture proper.
Losing Silver Efex Pro hasn’t been great, but OTOH C1P has some nice handling of files and its own charms. File management definitely not as robust as Aperture, or, I imagine, Lightroom.
I have toyed with the idea of using Lightroom as the DAM and Capture One (or other applications, as need be) as the RAW converter, with Lightroom being the repository for “finished” tiffs.
But of course more complicated, and more expenses, is not ideal.
I’ve been thinking about getting a new non-CaNikon camera, and Adobe infamously doesn’t handle some RAW files (especially Fujifilm raw) in some cases compared to Capture One. Also, Lightroom basically limits tethering support to Canon/Nikon bodies. So the top alternative is C1. But since I do continue to use Photoshop, and I am fairly ensconced in the photo management and tags in Lightroom, I might have to end up using both. But between the additional roundtrip annoyances and the inevitable C1 learning curve (and then inevitable confusion in shortcuts and keyboard commands when switching between apps) it could possibly just convince me to choose a more Lightroom-compatible camera, as bass-ackwards as that seems.
FWIW (dunno what you need to do with your photos, so my amateur point of view may be useless) I never had problems with LR processing Fuji’s raw files (X100T, X100F and X-T2), when I was still using it.
there’s the plugin (Iridient X-Transformer) described in this video too (which I never tried myself).
I get that – it wasn’t painless getting up to speed with Capture One, even as it has many similarities with Aperture. OTOH Capture One is widely customizable; I imagine there are a lot of Lightroom users who have remapped commands to be (a little?) more harmonious.
I don’t tether, but I gather Capture One really is superior to other applications, and there are a lot of nice accommodations for tethering. For example, there’s an overlay tool that lets you bring in an image (say type or something else that will eventually be juxtaposed with the capture image) such that as you tether you can keep the future juxtaposition in mind.
But yeah, I could well imagine that if LR is the cornerstone, having the most compatible camera for it isn’t such a bad idea. I’ve enjoyed sampling various camera types (many Pentax bodies, a few Sonys with one in use, a few Canons with one in use, and that little Fuji still in use) but I would be hard put to say one brand made on the whole the “best” images … so in this sense, the brand doesn’t matter as much as how it fits into one’s workflow.
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I’ve used Iridient X-Transformer … nice enough, very slow. An extra step.
Yes, the general consensus is that Iridient is the best raw converter for X-Trans sensors, but I’m not sure I want to go through the trouble. Lightroom’s issues with certain types of Fuji raw photos and ‘watercolor effect’ and ‘worms’ issues are pretty well documented in recent years. I shoot exclusively in raw so it’s a definite consideration to weigh.
I’m also interested in doing some tabletop work so tethering would become important at that point (and which is why I’m also considering at the same price-point the Panasonic G9 for its pixel-shift 80.6 MP High Resolution mode, or possibly a used Sony a7rii), meaning C1 would be the option to consider.
I haven’t had any problems with Fuji RAW files in Lightroom but They are from older Fuji digital cameras. I’m using LR Classic, no cloud at all and IMO you can’t beat it for the rich hierarchical keyword and extensive metadata options. I rarely edit my photos, many are actually historical scans that need to be captured in as accurate to the original as possible so LR is the best for me. My current LR catalog is still fairly small compared to many, about 28K images, but I’ve got about another 50K to add to it.