I find apple photo and the ai inside of it nothing more than a toy or at least something to play with and see what comes out.
But I almost always take photos with a standalone camera, and have always organized my files in a folder structure, since aperture days, and always manually created my “moments” or albums or collections or whatever you want to call them 
I guess if you want to have control over your files and the way they are displayed Photos is not for you.
As of friday I will be out of the adobe ecosystem too (I cannot justify 145€ a year for LR Classic - the only one I use), so I will rely on ON1 or Capture One or something else… this is still to see.
Right now I have a “clunky” set up, but it works for me.
Take picture on iPhone 11 Pro w/ Halide or Camera -> I decide I like it -> Airdrop to Mac -> Edit in Pixelmator -> Upload to Photos.app and a few other cloud-based places -> Post or share.
Once I get my new iPad Air I can install Pixelmator Photo and makes this a little easier 
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I’ve recently (earlier this week) moved most of my photos 2015-date into iCloud photos, and will be moving the rest (from Aperture) from 1998 or so. So far I’m pleased. I had stopped using Aperture in 2015 when its demise was announced, and was stuck with a bunch of chronological folders created through Hazel and PhotoSync.
I’m tied to a Mac when I need to use smart folders but that was the case with Aperture and the file system as well.
Nothing requires me to use the automatic groupings in Photos but they have been a great starting point.
I’d love for Photos to help me curate the “Moments”, but I want to have full artistic direction over the final draft
This is simply solved by creating my own album and selecting and adding photos from the curated groups.
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Thanks, Juan! I just checked out Halide and it looks like an interesting app. I’m probably going to buy it.
Do you shoot in RAW? If so, can you tell me how Apple Photos handles it? Are the photos converted to jpeg or whatever?
You’re going to love the iPad Air. One of the reasons I decided on it was to use with Pixelmator Pro. The iPad Air has a gorgeous screen. It’s really a neat machine.
All this is true of Apple Photos as well… the only issue is that you can only add tags (keywords) on the Mac as far as I can tell.
You should read the post linked here - generally raw stays raw but there are exceptions: How do you edit your personal photos?
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If you use Lightroom on the desktop then yes, a subscription is needed. Not sure what can be done with the mobile apps without a sub. Lightroom is a very powerful photo editor as well as organiser. I now use it for virtually all my editing, only going into Photoshop occasionally. The use of pre-sets makes it very quick to adopt a look and standard fixes to images.
Even though I don’t like Adobe’s draconian approach at times, I think they make the best photo editing and management software with nothing else coming close (yet!).
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Hi!
I am a bilingual teacher-primary, typically third grade. The kids used a lot of invented spellings, often phonetic which worked in Spanish oh so much better than English. Never mind the Spanglish!
When I started teaching I was pulling my hair out trying to decipher what they had written. And it took forever. I could have been a cryptographer during WWII! Well, I finally figured out a strategy. It helped immensely to read aloud, to myself, what they had written.
I saw your name and I reverted to my old efficacious habit. And then I just started cracking up! That’s really quite clever, areohbe! Did you come up with that avatar when you were one smart little kid? I may steal your idea: I like it that much!
Now I forgot what I was going to ask you… relevant to photos. 
Oh well…!
Tim,
Thanks! I was reading LR reviews. A couple of people mentioned that, in the free app, if you export the photos they are in small size, as opposed to how they are exported with the subscription. Do you know if that’s true?
Several people mentioned that the only subscription made available now is $9.99 per month as opposed to $4.99 Adobe had charged before.
Thanks ever so much, Spiv! You’ve helped a lot!
I’ve been looking at the camera you mentioned, and others like it, upon reading your post. They just boggle my mind! The ISO (I remember them as ASA) are in the thousands! I went to an awesome George Harrison concert and we were pushing the film to 800. A friend tried 1600 and had a hard time getting the photos developed. And the zoom lens capabilities: wow!
The mirrorless cameras are brand new?
Katie,
Not sure of the image quality as I have mine linked to my subscription.
Re the cost, I pay £99 per year in the UK. For this I get Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, Photoshop and Portfolio so I consider it a reasonable deal.
I use Lightroom Classic on my Mac and find it much better than the new cloud style Lightroom CC.
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I don’t know anyone who uses a film camera these days so I can’t say much there. What I do have here is decades of slides and film (my spouse has shelves stacked high with them) that I’m going to scan Any Day Now. I’ve got no interest in making more.
It would be hard to recommend a digital camera without knowing more about what you were going to do with it and what you were comfortable spending and carrying. That’s really a conversation that’s best had with yourself. What I can point you to is this free video course:
(registration required) that goes over some things to consider. It’s from last year and so a bit out of date (it looks like it doesn’t have much on some of the newer mirrorless systems that @SpivR mentions) but hopefully it will give you some ideas about what to look for in a camera. I used an earlier version of this when I was thinking about getting more serious about photography and found it helpful. I should say that the author of that course has a bias (which he explains) towards interchangeable lens cameras and away from smartphones and “fixed lens” cameras. The course reflects that. That was fine with me but might not be for you.
I use Lightroom Classic mostly because it has a very rich set of tools for organizing, tagging, and finding photos. It also makes it easy to compare photos and, while the editing tools aren’t always the easiest to use, they’re very powerful. But there’s a learning curve. If you go that route start small and just focus on what you need at first. There are other apps that provide some of this but none do it all quite as well as Lightroom Classic. Unfortunately it’s only available on a subscription basis now. They killed off the one time purchase version earlier this year.
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There’s limited functionality, but when you log in with your subscription ID all features unlock. It’s a great app that offers elective edits, sliders to adjust color/grain/detail/distortion etc, works with RAW, lets you organize and rate images, and more… while also offering cloud storage.
That said, there are a lot of apps which can duplicate the editing of Lightroom Mobile (without the storage), including my iPhone faves Darkroom and Snapseed (whic also work on iPadOS), and excellent iPad apps like Affinity Photo and Pixelmator Photo.
When I want to do quick and dirty editing and adding frames I tend to open up Camera+ (it’s a camera app, but I use it almost exclusively for post-processing). Otherwise I’ll usually go to Darkroom (bought the IAP unlock).
I’m not in Apple’s photo sync ecosystem at all, but even though I am an Adobe CC subscriber I don’t sync there either.
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When you say Lightroom has a very rich set of tools, which product do you mean, Lightroom or Lightroom Classic?
Good point. Lightroom Classic. I can’t do the cloud thing and so don’t have any experience with that version. I’ll add that to the earlier post. Thanks. Years on and these names are still confusing. It doesn’t help that they keep changing them.
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Thank you so very much! I’ll definitely check that course out and keep in mind all that you’ve said!
I love almost everything about OS13! I truly do. But I can’t believe what a mess they have made of my photos! Whoever perpetrated and authorized the annihilation that this update has done to Photos?
My photos are grouped into inane collages, with varying sizes. The general photos are not displayed well. They either all run together or they are too far apart. Videos I’d rather take time to enjoy later, just run on their own, as if they were running on some tacky website and messing with my peripheral vision.
They have screenshots mixed in with authentic photos. It seems like most everything is grouped by date. So when I typed a date in… well, they couldn’t give me that. No, the search returns with an arbitrary range of dates.
Then they link the photos to the map. I never asked them to do that or ANY of these “nightmares”! The worst part is going to be trying to figure out how to undo the devastation. I can’t opt out of ANYTHING!
I am certainly going to have to decide on an authentic photos app and stick with it.
And I can’t help but shudder at what the future is going to bring! Yuck.
That’s exactly what I was thinking today! I almost always shot at ASA 100. I recall that if I shot at ASA 400, the photos started getting too grainy. I saved it for sunsets and concerts- two of the things I found the hardest to shoot but which I thoroughly enjoyed.
I do miss getting the prints. I mean, what if Apple goes out of business? (Yeah– right!) But you had something. Ink is outrageous and the printers are not what they were when I first got one. I had a workhorse that printed nice photos too. But my scanner is pretty cool although I’ll never scan the way I want to.
I love being able to repair photos etc. I can erase annoying people! I only had access to a darkroom for one course.
Just saw this article in the App Store about selective editing in Lightroom Mobile:
I’ve been adding a bunch of old M4/3 photos to Photos. None of these have embedded location data but Photos (rightly) infers that if I took a photo around the same time on my phone, I was probably in the same place with my camera, and they’re all clustered in a single Memory. I’ll take that over poking around on a map to set the metadata manually any day.
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