I’m hoping for some help with a problem I’m having. I’ve been playing around a bit with Luminar 3 for photo-editing, and I’m enjoying the output relative to the time spent in editing. With the current version of Luminar, they’ve got a fairly straightforward browsing component/DAM for photos. However, it can’t access the Apple Photos library directly. You can import individual images into a folder that Luminar can access. Or export images from Photos (app) into a folder elsewhere.
What I was hoping to do accomplish is to create some sort of syncing method between the Photos library and a folder structure elsewhere on my computer. I suspected Hazel could help me with this (I’m still learning how to make that program work best for me), but I haven’t gotten anywhere with it. Any tips out there for syncing the Photos library elsewhere on your computer?
FYI. There is a Mastering Luminar 3 group on Facebook. The guy who runs it is a professional photographer and a very knowledgeable Luminar user. It’s a member-only group, so request access then post there. You might get more expert opinions that in MPU…not that there aren’t some absolute geniuses hanging out here!
I don’t think there’s really anything out there that does manage iPhoto/Photos.app images. Even Lightroom, which has the best (yet still clunky) photo management desktop app (module) has always required exporting images from Photos. On1 can’t do it, Capture One can’t do it either. It’s a tough programming nut to crack, and for cross-platform image processing apps it’s not something they want to have to invest resources to reverse engineer then support as the Photos app (and macOS) gets updated.
Luminar took the easiest possible Library Module approach to managing images on the Mac - they don’t manage them in their own database but merely scan your drive for images and read the metadata so they can link to additional metadata (color labels, ratings, edits). They expect you to create your own folder hierarchy and place images wherever you want, and make you manage them, and the app will simply find them.
I transfer all phone pics to Photos on my Mac, but I use Lightroom for all my DSLR RAW images. I bought Luminar 2 and got a free upgrade to v.3, but I’m finding it insufficiently compelling to migrate anything to it. It’s fast but crashed on me a couple of times. And while its editing is more sophisticated than Apple Photos, it has a long way to go to match the polish of Lightroom.
For now I continue to use Lightroom with a handful of 3rd-party modules to which I sometimes round trip images, and if I want to do extra editing on my images in Apple Photos I’lll ‘Edit In’ Luminar and just save back into Photos.