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Help me with what photo apps to use (Lightroom, Apple Photos)

J

jboolean

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 19, 2023
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My photo life has been a mess since Apple discontinued iPhoto and Aperture. Back in the day, I loved being meticulous with organizing my photos into Events and tagging People etc. The editing features of Aperture were good.

I'm a hobbyist, not a pro, but love fiddling with the editing photos from occasional DSLR shoots, as well as having a way to organize phone photos and scans from my film shooting.

I switch to working in Lightroom (now Classic) in 2020. My current workflow is to import all photos, including photos shot on my Android phone in here. I love the editing tools, such as masked edits. Not so much the organization features, which are basically folders you have to do manually. It's terrible at organizing random photos shot with my phone. I feel like I'm still living in 2006 with my workflow basically being to take photos off the camera or phone and onto the computer, with no cloud syncing or way to see the photos on the phone again.
Yeah, I have an Android phone now (yeah this is MacRumors, still a Mac fan but my last iPhone was the 4), but never signed up for Google Photos as it looks like a joke (there's not even a desktop app). My next phone may be an iPhone if moving fully back to the Apple world would help.


I guess my question is this: what combination of tools to folks like when sometimes you want to do more "pro" shoots and serious processing that the pro tools provide, and sometimes you just take random phone shots where tools like Apple Photos really shine at organization and auto-syncing? Do you maintain two libraries and export/import photos between them?

The only suggest I've had so far is to import into Lighttroom for editing, then export to Photos for organization. Oy.
 
I use Photoshop, Lightroom, Topaz and Flickr (Flickr for organizing photos into albums).
 
Nothing I have come accross is a good option for organising the randomness of phone photos. I use lrc for my normal cameras and just Apple photos for my phone. If I want to edit a phone pic in LR (not classic) it’s pretty good for picking it, and then I export it and put it into classic into my ‘proper’ collection if I feel the need.
 
I don't know if it helps, but I just gave up on Photos.app as a catalog. For me, it just warehouses iPhone photos that I take, or receive e.g., in a text message.

I look through it every now and then and export pictures I might want to keep to a folder on my desktop, where I fold these pictures into my photo editing process: geotag (I just check the iPhone photos; they're usually OK), import to a monthly session in Capture One; at the end of the month fold the session into a larger catalog. There the iPhone photos just live with the other pictures from other cameras.
 
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I use Photo Mechanic, then Lightroom Classic. Occasionally Photoshop if I'm doing something complex with layers.

I organize my photos into folders by date, and use PM to edit, cull, rename, sort and add metadata so photos are searchable. This allows me to use MacOS's finder to do my searches, and I'm not dependent on a certain piece of software to organize my photos. Then I back them up to multiple drives, which I store locally.

I stay away from the Photos app because I want to be in control of filenames, storage, metadata, etc. and I want to be able to open a folder in a finder and know exactly which are my best photos, without ever having to open an image.
 
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I have used Photoshop for 20+ years now, and it is THE tool to have. Photoshop is complex because photo editing is complex. If you want to do it, you need to invest some time in learning how. I read numerous books early on and then practiced relentlessly work Photoshop until I could accomplish pretty much anything reasonable that I wanted to do to a photo.

There are LOTS of other photo tools around (I mentioned a few in another post in another thread), but Photoshop is light years ahead of them all
 
I use affinity photo which is like photoshop but much user friendly, and is made for Mac.
 
Per my post above, Photoshop is my key tool, but I will occasionally break out GraphicConverter or GIMP for things that they are each exceptionally good at.

For photo management, I title each photo with the date, the topic and any key people present. This is rather like metadata, but embedded in the title, which is 100% portable to any environment. I then organize my photos by year, with one folder per year. Again, using folders vs. any specific photo organizing tool makes my photo "library" (a tree of folders) 100% portable to any environment.

In general, my smart phone is the major source of new photos, via the camera, shares from other people's phones, saves of photos from apps and so on. So, I use my phone as the photo "master" and everything else gets a copy of what is on the phone.

"Everything else" is my main Mac, my tablet, and one backup phone. I use Dropbox to tie it all together. An app on my phone called DropSync syncs the contents of my phone-based photo "library" (again, just a folder tree) with the Dropbox cloud. The same app, running on my tablet and my backup phone, syncs the Dropbox cloud stuff to the tablet/phone, and Dropbox itself syncs the Dropbox photos to my Mac

The great part about this setup is that it is multi-directional. A change to any of my photos on any of these devices is nearly instantly sync'd to all the others. Any new photo that shows up in my photo library on any of these devices is automatically added to all the others. Ditto with photo deletions from any device... nearly instantly sync'd to all the others.

In essence, this setup delivers a fully distributed photo database. I can add photos from any of the devices, edit them locally or using Photoshop on my Mac and the results are sync'd to all of the involved devices.

It is a pretty sweet setup.

... and the best part? Because the key photo metadata is included in the file's title, it is all searchable on any of the devices using their native file search capability. Sweet!

The downside? You need the discipline to constantly name and file your photos as you take them, or shortly thereafter. This is a manual process, and one that I spend a fair amount of time at on a regular basis, but it is well worth it.

There is one "gotcha" to be aware of. If anything goes "off the rails" and deletes your photos, they nearly instantly get deleted from all devices. So, a software glitch could completely wipe out your photo collection. I deal with this by... backups! I routinely back up my photo library, using my Mac, to an external drive that is then physically and electrically disconnected. I have only needed this backup once, when I was still using OneDrive, not Dropbox. A OneDrive glitch wiped everything out and wham! it disappeared everywhere. Thank goodness for backups!
 
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Excellent! I will try it then and see. Thanks @AM2354!

I was looking on their "Buy" page with no luck, but when I dropped out to Google search and asked it for a free trial of Affinity, it took me right to the link you provided. It is all about the question you ask and I'm where you ask it.

Thanks for digging this up and being gracious about it... I should have done that myself.
 
mac57mac57 said:
Excellent! I will try it then and see. Thanks @AM2354!

I was looking on their "Buy" page with no luck, but when I dropped out to Google search and asked it for a free trial of Affinity, it took me right to the link you provided. It is all about the question you ask and I'm where you ask it.

Thanks for digging this up and being gracious about it... I should have done that myself.
Click to expand...
No problem. I hope you like it.
 
A lot to like about Pixelmator Pro. That said it has to be bought through Apple and thus far I have been completely stymied in my attempts to set up a new Apple Account. Tells me I have too many Apple Accounts on the computer, even though I have just one which I want to deep six as I can't change out of date info. Zero accounts on the user profile where I am trying to establish an account.
 
I've been using Apple Photos as my "library" and minor editing (the Search functions are fantastic once you dig into them), and Affinity Photo for serious editing (I'm a hobbyist, even in retirement, and still try to set composition, exposure, contrast, etc on the camera, with minimal futzing on the computer later (but I'm an old fart).
 
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