My Photo Collection is a Mess!

[Qwerty11]

I have everything in Aperture. The photos are just sitting there; I haven't exported anything. Since Aperture has went the way of the Dodo Bird, I want to clean up everything and transition to a new platform. I also want to simplify everything. I think Lightroom is more than I need.

I want to:
1. Have a super easy and clean way to catalog photos and do simple edits.
2. Export everything to an online repository were friends/family can login and buy prints. This will also serve as an online backup.

Is Apple's Photos the answer for #1?

Definitely need help with #2.

 

[MCAsan]

Look at OnOneSoftware's Photo RAW product. They are selling preorders right now and it will ship likely by mid October. In the meantime, you can continue with Aperture or use their Photo 10 app. Keep in mind that you will likely be moving from a hidden package storage of your master images to a referenced catalog where you decide on a file system set of folders and subfolders to store the masters. Plan well in advance how you want the folders arranged. Personally I store only by date and use key words as needed. In Lightroom I use collections to logically group images by a common theme. You can do similar in Photo 10 by the Albums feature of their browser.

https://www.on1.com/landing/photo-raw-offer/

 

[HBOC]

i have Adobe CC 2015. I had Aperture forever, so was used to that. However, you can set up LR cataloging system anyway you want - and it is pretty easy!

 

[Qwerty11]

What about online storage for friends and family to login to, see the photos, and download prints?

 

[simonsi]

What about online storage for friends and family to login to, see the photos, and download prints?

Dropbox, they can download and print themselves.

 

[Ray2]

On the surface, Photos appears a natural move if you're using Aperture in a managed mode and don't need extensive editing or metadata capability. If you're heavy into metadata, Photos is poor. If you run multiple libraries, Photos can only use iCloud with one of them (your primary). It's in your Mac, import some images into it and see how you like it. There are other gotchas in Photos that can turn the simplest of endeavors into work arounds. So wring it out well before you move your Aperture library into it.

If NO for Photos: Do you want to "catalog" or browse images in Finder folders?

If the former, Lightroom even if you don't use half its functionality. The DAM side is superb. For me, it's absolutely stable (something I could never say for Aperture which I used since v2). Lightroom will import your Aperture library flawlessly. However, understand its import options and make sure you select the ones that are right for you. In my case I choose to export tifs of high rated Aperture versions to the same folders that contained my raws. If you let Lightroom do this you end up with a ton of jpegs, all in one disorganized unique folder and all with unique names. Remember once you're out of Aperture your edits will not survive unless they've already been exported to tif or JPEG.

If the latter, take a look at Lyn. It's cheap, it's simple, it works. If nothing more, it serves as a reference baseline of what to look for. There's actually not much out there. OnOne RAW was mentioned above. I'd let others shake it out first. My experience with their products suggests it will have more than a few bugs to work out at launch time, and probably well beyond launch time.

Before you begin any transition, clean up Aperture first. You don't want to do this in an app you're not familiar with. Run all maintenance routines, run relocate files if you want/need to move from managed to referenced, make sure metadata is how you want it. I also trashed 15,000 images (of 52,000) before a move to Lightroom and have trashed at least another 5,000 since. My current philosophy is if it doesn't get printed or published it gets trashed. The other philosophy is disk space is cheap.

If you really want to charge friends and family for images, any number of photo sharing sites offer shopping cart capability. Often with an up-charge. JAlbum is a cheap and easy way to do it. JAlbum was my replacement for iCloud.

 

[Qwerty11]

How does the Lightroom for iPad work? I'm wanting to seamlessly work from Mac's to Pad.

Any thoughts on Snapfish or Shuterfly?

 

[robgendreau]

Download and try Lr Mobile. It's a free app; some functions won't work without a subscription but it would give you an idea of the capabilities. With the CC subscription you can synch collections from the desktop, and share. But it isn't the best online gallery out there.

Photos is awful IMHO and Apple's online storage is expensive. But it could be an easier transition if your needs aren't great and you weren't doing much with Aperture anyway. It's kind of a closed loop and all-or-nothing though.

Some of us use a combo, though: Capture One, Lr, Photoshop, etc, and then export JPEGS to Photos which then shares them across Apple mobile devices. So we use Photos/iCloud Photo Library only as sort of a gallery, which keeps us within storage limits and makes it easy to share certain pictures. But we do most organizing and editing and adjusting in other products. Just a matter of getting organized.

Dunno about Snapfish these days, but Shutterfly could work. Again, just demo some stuff.

 

[Ray2]

How does the Lightroom for iPad work? I'm wanting to seamlessly work from Mac's to Pad.

Any thoughts on Snapfish or Shuterfly?

How much experience have you had editing and organizing on an iPad? I forced myself to use it for travel for 4 years. That's a minimum of 4 months travel every year. Abandoned it. Unless you already know an iPad is a workable solution for you, I would not base any PP software decision on an iPad. As robgendreau pointed out, it's quite simple to keep a downsized set of images in Photos for syncing to iOS devices, creating on-line albums and distribution.

I won't go into the limitations of iPad editing deeply. I used Photogene+, great app. The issue is organization and the editing on the iPad display is not a good proxy for print or a decent monitor/display. I found myself using the iPad for quick distributing then redoing everything once I got home. It's been replaced with a rMBP. For short trips I used to use the iPad for backup for my SD cards. That's now been replaced with an iPhone with sufficient storage.

I use standalone LR (no CC suite). I looked into Adobe's mobile app but was not impressed at the time. Don't know where it's at today. Photos is a limited app in many respects (no local adjustments, poor DAM). You still need to export downsized copies for iOS syncing and web use. So having an all in one solution turns out to be a myth. The same amount of work, may as well get an app that serves you well on your Mac and rely on Photos for distribution only. This approach also buys me an easily transportable library that can be synced to 2 Mac mini's we have at 2 homes for media and my wife's Air.

 

[MCAsan]

Lightroom Mobile on an IOS device lets you use all the global adjustments to edit images and send the updated image back to the desktop via the cloud. What is missing is: local adjustments such as clone & heal, radial filter, adjustment brush. Then there are virtually no plugins for IOS like there are for MacOS.

So much depends on exactly what you need to do in the field vs back on a desktop. The wife and I usually only do initial culls in the field. Once the images are finalized on the desktop and put into collections, we synch those collections to our IOS devices to show the images.

Even if Adobe updates Lr Mobile to do local adjustments....where is Nik, OnOne, Topaz, DxO, plugins for it on IOS?

 

[Ray2]

How do you cull on the iPad? Trash the files or mark as rejected and that syncs with the Mac?

 

[MCAsan]

On the iPad you can see the jpg previews of images sitting on SD cards in the attached card reader. Simply don't import bad images into camera roll at all. or import all into camera roll then into Lr Mobile. Then in Lr Mobile, trash what you don't want. Lr Mobile is part of the CC subscription package along with Lr for the desktop, Photoshop, and Portfolio space for you to create and post galleries of your images. Do a free trial.

Dont forget the rest of the Adobe mobile apps....Fix, Mix, Capture, Express.....etc.

 

[ChrisA]

....
I want to:

2. Export everything to an online repository were friends/family can login and buy prints. This will also serve as an online backup....

You do not really want to export EVERYTHING for your friends/family. You should select the best photos and place them out for others to see. Typically that means one tens shots or even one in a hundred. Simply by removing the 90% to 99% of the worst photos you will make the average quality of the collection look MUCH better.

Those photo sites are NOT for backup either. They can keep your finished work you want others to see but the original un-editied work needs to live in a real photo library that is organized and indexed and has metadata and tags. You need to back this indexing and tags and the unedited files.

Lightroom will do what you need. Then export to any photos type site you like (photo bucket or Google or whatever) Then get a backup system in place that covered ALL of your data. The backup rule of thumb is to always have at least three copies of the data on different media and at two different locations (even while the backup software is running) That is the dead-minimum. It is easy to do: Use time machine to an external disk (this disk must be 2X laster, at least than your computer's disk) and also subscribe to an on-line backup service like Crashplan or BackBlaze for $5 a month. That is the minimum. If you want the data to last 100 years you must take more steps.

My prediction is that in 100 years there will be VERY FEW 100 year old photos. Today I can see photos of when my grandmother was young in the 1920's but there will be no such photos for our grandkids, No one takes backup seriously enough to ensure 100 year lifetime of files.

Point is: The the three functions (1) organizing and ending, (2) publication and (3) backup are all independent and you have to think about each of them independently

 

[Ray2]

You do not really want to export EVERYTHING for your friends/family. You should select the best photos and place them out for others to see. Typically that means one tens shots or even one in a hundred. Simply by removing the 90% to 99% of the worst photos you will make the average quality of the collection look MUCH better.

Those photo sites are NOT for backup either. They can keep your finished work you want others to see but the original un-editied work needs to live in a real photo library that is organized and indexed and has metadata and tags. You need to back this indexing and tags and the unedited files.

Lightroom will do what you need. Then export to any photos type site you like (photo bucket or Google or whatever) Then get a backup system in place that covered ALL of your data. The backup rule of thumb is to always have at least three copies of the data on different media and at two different locations (even while the backup software is running) That is the dead-minimum. It is easy to do: Use time machine to an external disk (this disk must be 2X laster, at least than your computer's disk) and also subscribe to an on-line backup service like Crashplan or BackBlaze for $5 a month. That is the minimum. If you want the data to last 100 years you must take more steps.

My prediction is that in 100 years there will be VERY FEW 100 year old photos. Today I can see photos of when my grandmother was young in the 1920's but there will be no such photos for our grandkids, No one takes backup seriously enough to ensure 100 year lifetime of files.

Point is: The the three functions (1) organizing and ending, (2) publication and (3) backup are all independent and you have to think about each of them independently

Why would you ever keep the 99 out of 100 that aren't worth showing anyone? Or even the 9 out of 10. Let alone worrying about backing them up multiple times. Not for me. If it's not worth showing to people it gets trashed.

There's good reason very few 100 year old photos won't exist in 100 years. Because there's no demand for them. I have a decent set of grandparent images over 100 years old. Offered scans to my kids, zero takers. Administrative instructions in my will reads trash the lot of them. No sense in creating emotional baggage as they all know photography is important to me. I'm a third generation photographer. If I kept all the images that have tumbled my way when grandfather and father passed away I'd have to add rooms to our home.

 

[ChrisA]

Yes, you are right, keeping to 90$ is not reasonable. But I do keep MANY more images then I show to others.

Some images are important to me but few others would want to see it. A few examples are (1) my daughter in her holloween costume from 1st grade. or my dog when we first got her or my long gone grandparents and places I went on vacation 15 years ago. Few of these are really good photos. and (2) photos I take as records. These have value to me just as handwritten notes do. (pipes before I backfill a trench with dirt) (3) interesting photos I might edit some day or use to make a panorama shot or just "stock" I might use in a document I might get around to making like "How to plant a tree" or "how to change the spindle bearing of a Seig X2 mill" Ihave MANY photos the other people do not want to look at

and the BIGGEST category of all. I want to archive my ORIGINALS that are about 50$% Nikon NEF format and not suitable for publication. Even if I publish a photo I keep the unedited RAW file.

So I will always have a MUCH larger collection in my library then the collection I want to publish

But you are right, I don't actually keep all of the 99% that is not published. I delete quite a lot but then after that only about 1% is going to be good enough to show to people who are not interested in the subject

 

[Ray2]

I also keep the raws and full size jpegs of all published shots. And yes I keep pics that no one ever sees (house renovations, boat work, etc). I've been shooting a long time and woke up one day and realized I had about 80,000 images cataloged of which 8,000 had been published or printed at one time or another. Virtually all from digital cameras. It's now down to 33,000 images and I still have some weeding to do. Not the most fun but I believe it's improved my photography. It suggested not only more initial culling and culling once a project was closed out was desirable but, get the shot right in the first place.