I take photos on my iPhone and also an Olympus camera. With the Olympus I shoot RAW and develop in Lightroom. (I know this is excessive, but I enjoy the process.) Since Lightroom’s editing and organisation features are great (e.g. photo libraries split over multiple disks), I would like to keep using it as my “master” photo collection.
However, I have a new baby, and would like to be able to easily share photos (and videos if possible) with family members in some way which is smarter than just emailing photos around like it’s 2003
The only thing I can think to do is to periodically manually export jpegs from albums in Lightroom to a folder, manually import them to Apple Photos, and keep a text file telling me when I last did it so I avoid dupes.
Luckily my family are all Mac users, and I think there’s a way to have a privately shared photo stream with Photos (right?) But there must be a way to automate this, right?
Also, is there a better way to share photos privately than using Apple Photos? I don’t want family pics uploaded to Facebook, Instragram, Google etc. I trust Apple not to mistreat my private data, I don’t trust those other companies.
I’d love to know what people are doing to share their photos privately with family members, especially if they’re keeping the master copies in Lightroom.
Unfortunately, we don’t have a newborn (congratulations!), but we do share family pictures with the widespread family. I also use Lightroom in conjunction with a DSLR and I’m using an export preset in Lightroom which indicates if I exported pictures from Lightroom for the photo sharing with a specific keyword. Based on that I know in the future which picture has already been shared. These pictures are exported to specific folder in which Keyboard maestro kicks off a process to transfer these to our sharing site and sends a short message to everybody that new pics are there.
Have you looked into Lightroom CC, not the Classic version? It would provide you with a one place to store and edit, share your photos with your family. It can be setup to import your iPhone photos automatically too. Only thing is you’d have to pay for Adobe cloud storage depending on the plan you have chosen. You can have the Lightroom CC and 1 TB of storage for 9.99/month, or the photography plan which includes Lightroom Classic, Lightroom CC and Photoshop but only 20 GB for 9.99 or a Photography plan with 1TB for 19.99/month where you get both version of Lightroom and photoshop.
Using Lightroom CC enables you to store your RAW files in the cloud automatically, with Lightroom Classic CC you can only have the smart preview stored in the cloud. If you already pay for Lightroom photography plan, you can try Lightroom CC and see how it works with the 20 GB of space, try to share albums with family and get their feedback to see if they like it and if you want to migrate all your photos to that. It’s a great solution for people with both DSLR and iPhone or android phones.
Here’s a tutorial on how to share an album in LR CC.
