Pixelmator and Photos

All of which raises the topic of moving on from Photos to Lightroom or other DAM that can easily do roundtrips to PS, PSE, Nik, Topaz......etc.

LR 6 costs less that a good circular polarizer.

carlgo said:

External editors cannot be accessed from Photos, but Pixelmator can access the Photos library now. Why not simply use Photos as a library/organizing/importing component of PM?

Kind of turns things around as Photos now becomes the external resource.

It would seem that the ease of incorporating Photo's library would be the key.

Click to expand...

Why not? because once you're finished editing a photo Photos doesn't know that it exists. Kind of hard to have a photo organizer that doesn't know where your photos are. Probably better to use a photo browser, Lightroom, Mylio, After Shot, etc etc.

carlgo said:

Can one do roundtrips out of Pixelmator to Nik, etc?
.

Click to expand...

First, Pixelmater is not a DAM with a library module. So why would you want to round trip from Pixelmatr to another peer app?

Lightroom, Aperture (of Blessed Memory), and Capture One Pro are the only DAMs I know about that have editing capabilities and can do round trips to other editing apps. So it is a short DAM list.

carlgo said:

An under one roof photo program is ideal, and LR and C1 are clearly capable. However, some people might want to use the attributes that Photos does have, but would also like additional editing capabilities for their special photos.

If you like Pixelmator and it can use Photos as an external (referenced?) library...might work. No subscriptions, perhaps trying harder.

Hopefully somebody will try this combo and report on it.

Click to expand...

It's dead simple, just not as efficient as other products. Just use Pixelmator to open a file in the Photos Library, edit, save. If you want it in Photos, just import it. Not any more difficult than if you got a photo via email, or copied it from a thumbdrive, or whatever.

And that's true with tons of other applications as well; just use "Open..." in the application's File menu, navigate in the dialog box to "Media," and your Photos library should be there. Works with Acorn, but not 2008 MS Word.

Once you've saved that edited photo just control click and use the Share... item to add to Photos. Or open Photos and import.

Obviously lots of more capable applications can watch folders, automatically import edited photos via a round trip, etc. But it isn't too burdensome to work this way if you wanna use Photos.

BTW, take a look at Mylio. It can automatically see that you've edited a photo in another application and import it; it doesn't require a plugin. Basically, it watches any imported folder. So if I edit an image in that folder (even if I do that without even opening Mylio itself) using say Pixelmator, edit, save a JPG, Mylio automatically adds that JPG to its photos. And it can do that even with referenced folders from Lr if you use that.