Photo organization

[DevNull0]

I wonder if anyone can suggest a convenient way to store and view my photo library.

For years, I've organized my photos as a bunch of folders, one folder for each year and within that a folder for every event where I take pictures in the formate YYMMDD-Event-Description. 85% of my photos are shot on my SLR and are raw files and for the files I work on a little bit, there's jpegs mixed into the folders. Another 10% of the photos are shot on my wife's iPhone and basically archived by year as one giant folder for each year. The rest of what I have is shot on my iPhone and to really complicate things, I've got a mix of photos I care about and photos of reminders, notes, price stickers in stores, labels from the backs of electronics, etc -- things I want to keep on my phone but I don't want in my photo archive.

I have photos this way going back about 10 years, around 600 gigs in total including videos mixed in.

I've recently bought a 2017 MBP and iPhone 7, so I can no longer store all my photos on the computer's limited internal storage and I'd like to have a library of my favourite photos mirror to my iPhone.

I don't even know where to begin trying to organize this, what I'd ideally like to have is a nice catalog with all my "good" edited photos showing and easy to browse as jpegs (and copied to my phone, mac mini and old MBP, and if possible shared to my wife's iPhone) along with all 600 gig of the photos available to easily accessible on my new mac along with the other photos.

I use Photoshop CS6 as my primary editing tool, but I also make extensive use of InDesign CS6 and I'm not willing to subscribe to CC. Lightroom 6 is not an option afaik because of the lack of RAW support for newer cameras. Photos doesn't seem to allow me to hide any photos and doesn't seem to have any good way to work with Photoshop.

Sorry this is so long, but I've also left out a ton of detail to keep it as short as I could. Thanks for any suggestions you can offer.

 

[TheDrift-]

Adobe are still selling LR6 stand alone

https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/creative-cloud/help/download-install-single-app-Lightroom-6.html

Presumably they must also be giving it RAW support?

If they are selling it and not supporting it that would be pretty poor imo

 

[DevNull0]

LR6 looks like a good option but as far as I can tell they haven't updated it with new camera support since 2015. I may be wrong because it seems hard to find the information (as Adobe really wants to push you to CC).

I've actually never used LR before, does it have a good browsing mode of only selected files? I also may actually need CC to share it across other devices for viewing?

 

[TheDrift-]

LR6 looks like a good option but as far as I can tell they haven't updated it with new camera support since 2015. I may be wrong because it seems hard to find the information (as Adobe really wants to push you to CC).

I've actually never used LR before, does it have a good browsing mode of only selected files? I also may actually need CC to share it across other devices for viewing?

Well LR has a free trial so it seems it would cost you nothing to see if its suitable

http://www.adobe.com/uk/downloads.html

I would mention I found LR a bit of a steep learning curve, esp coming from a Mac/aperture environment, scott kelly's book was very helpful

 

[Pockett]

You can always purchase an external hard disk which connects through USB if you are having trouble storing all of your content. You can usually find ones with 2 terabytes of capacity for around $100 on any online retailer.

 

[DevNull0]

Well LR has a free trial so it seems it would cost you nothing to see if its suitable

http://www.adobe.com/uk/downloads.html

I would mention I found LR a bit of a steep learning curve, esp coming from a Mac/aperture environment, scott kelly's book was very helpful

True, I need to give it a test drive. I've only been hesitant because the trial is only available for CC, so whatever I do during the trial may not be backward comparable to LR6.

You can always purchase an external hard disk which connects through USB if you are having trouble storing all of your content. You can usually find ones with 2 terabytes of capacity for around $100 on any online retailer.

I have bare external 2.5" SSDs which I'm connecting via a SATA to USB-C cable and they work extremely well for a huge working space. The cheap spinners you're talking about make fantastic backup drives and I use a lot for that purpose including off-site backup, but they're far too slow for a working space.

My trouble though is organizing and keeping track of all the pictures. It's so hard to find and view them, it's at the point I'll print a bunch and lose the files in my archive...my archive is a total disaster at this point.

 

[mollyc]

I agree Lightroom is probably the best option for this task and I have been using it since LR1. I don't think there is a ton that is in CC that isn't in LR6, other than some very specific filters.

However, if you are really concerned about backwards compatibility, you might want to try something like Adobe Bridge (which comes with Photoshop) but is a standalone, free program. You ultimately just browse your photos through the folder structure on your computer, but it gives you very large thumbnails to help cull, and you can use ratings to sort, etc.

http://www.adobe.com/products/bridge.html

 

[DevNull0]

I agree Lightroom is probably the best option for this task and I have been using it since LR1. I don't think there is a ton that is in CC that isn't in LR6, other than some very specific filters.

However, if you are really concerned about backwards compatibility, you might want to try something like Adobe Bridge (which comes with Photoshop) but is a standalone, free program. You ultimately just browse your photos through the folder structure on your computer, but it gives you very large thumbnails to help cull, and you can use ratings to sort, etc.

http://www.adobe.com/products/bridge.html

I've actually been using Bridge since CS2 and it's my current solution, so I'm very comfortable with it. The limitations I'm having a problem with now are that from each group of photos I take, I've printed the ones I wanted and left everything in the archive. Now it's just not easy to find anything in all the old pictures. And I want a be able to have a digital album of all the best ones to carry with me (iPad or iPhone).

I've installed the LR trial, only 7 days and I can see I'm going to have a horrible time with the steep learning curve TheDrift was talking about. I have access to Lynda.com so I've been viewing videos. So far LR feels like a worse and clunkier version of Bridge, collections just don't feel like the right model for me. I've loaded my last 10 folders (about 2500 images) into the LR catalog. I did 1 folder = 1 collection which was horribly tedious and I'm not seeing where it gets me that I did't already have in bridge.

 

[TheDrift-]

I've actually been using Bridge since CS2 and it's my current solution, so I'm very comfortable with it. The limitations I'm having a problem with now are that from each group of photos I take, I've printed the ones I wanted and left everything in the archive. Now it's just not easy to find anything in all the old pictures. And I want a be able to have a digital album of all the best ones to carry with me (iPad or iPhone).

I've installed the LR trial, only 7 days and I can see I'm going to have a horrible time with the steep learning curve TheDrift was talking about. I have access to Lynda.com so I've been viewing videos. So far LR feels like a worse and clunkier version of Bridge, collections just don't feel like the right model for me. I've loaded my last 10 folders (about 2500 images) into the LR catalog. I did 1 folder = 1 collection which was horribly tedious and I'm not seeing where it gets me that I did't already have in bridge.

Yeah LR is hard work, the first time I tried it I went straight back to aperture, only when apple ended aperture support did i go back and give it another go...I still hated it...I then got that Scott Kelby book and persevered.

I know lots of pro's who just use bridge, and get by just fine.

For me, I sell some photos as stock so the ability to organise and rate is very useful.

 

[mollyc]

I've actually been using Bridge since CS2 and it's my current solution, so I'm very comfortable with it. The limitations I'm having a problem with now are that from each group of photos I take, I've printed the ones I wanted and left everything in the archive. Now it's just not easy to find anything in all the old pictures. And I want a be able to have a digital album of all the best ones to carry with me (iPad or iPhone).

I've installed the LR trial, only 7 days and I can see I'm going to have a horrible time with the steep learning curve TheDrift was talking about. I have access to Lynda.com so I've been viewing videos. So far LR feels like a worse and clunkier version of Bridge, collections just don't feel like the right model for me. I've loaded my last 10 folders (about 2500 images) into the LR catalog. I did 1 folder = 1 collection which was horribly tedious and I'm not seeing where it gets me that I did't already have in bridge.

Hmmm....I'm lucky that I figured out an organization system that worked for me pretty well right off the bat and I would be so overwhelmed if I had to tackle a project like this 10 years in.

What I do is have a folder for each year (2017), then nested down is each month (2017-01), nested within each file type (Raw/iPhone/GoPro). When I am done with the month and exporting, I make a final folder within each month for JPEG. I don't name by occasion, I name by date and camera (camera is easily sorted by metadata, but I regularly shoot with multiple cameras so I like to see that in the file name).

I don't print a ton of photos individually, but I do print scrapbook pages, and for those I have a To Print folder and a Printed folder, and I will compile them in the first, and then when I have printed them, I drag them over to the Printed folder. I am wondering if something like that would work for you?

The nice thing about LR is that you can sort by so many metadata items to really find what you are looking for. And if you tag and keyword you can find things easily that way as well. Also, LR has a mobile side where you could sync among devices.

 

[robgendreau]

I'd say hang with Lr CC. Someday you're gonna lose CS6, and the Lr/Ps/Lr Mobile bundle is a great deal. Lr Mobile is really evolving fast; if you've got a mobile that can use it, then it would solve the issue with having a gallery of photos to carry around. It doesn't need JPEGs; it uses smart previews. So with RAW you could still edit them. And it has some very good editing tools; not Ps, but pretty nice for some stuff. BTW, Lr 6 gets all the raw processing updates of Lr CC. It lacks some tools like dehaze (global and local), and I think some prespective stuff, maybe HDR, etc.

But aside from the applications, sounds like you have gotten stuck with a workflow that uses folders for organization, which is horrible. They should be the very last tool for organization, since they're very inflexible.

I don't even like collections, esp static ones. I use them only for temporary stuff, like recent imports I need to work on, some candidates for printing, etc.

Much better is to use the metadata designed for images. That's why it's there. There's already a ton of info, like the dates. Camera. Lens. Exposure, F-stop, camera make, maybe geolocation. Bridge has rather rudimentary finding tools; Lr through filters can do much more.

The other info you added to your images, event and description, really didn't get added to them, but only to the folder they were in. Not ideal. But if that same event were a keyword, or even a caption or title, it would be much easier to find. The same is true of description. Both in say caption, title, location, etc etc. When you go through the IPTC tags, you see literally tons of ways to describe your images, and add that to the exif and you've got an awful lot of unique info to use to find stuff. Put that into filters in Lr, or into smart collections, and suddenly you've have way less of a hassle finding stuff. I prefer to start with keywords, esp hierarchical ones, since they're so flexible.

And the info you can add and manage extends beyond just descriptions of content. For example, I have a plugin that tracks all my exports, and I keyword those as well, so I can find files I exported for certain clients, at certain times, of certain subjects, and even have a snapshot of the state of the image at the time it was exported in the original's history, so I can go right back to where I left off editing it.

But for some printing (to say services) and other export tasks, the publishing feature of Lr is killer. It maintains a continung relationship with the images. So I keep, for example, a thumbdrive of exports I've printed. If I get a suggestion to change an image from someone I sent one such export to, I can re-edit in Lr, and have it export a new image to that thumbdrive to replace the old one. Or on Flickr or 500px or whatever.

I think the key is to figure out what you typically need to find, and then work on adding metadata that can make that easier. You could use a plugin in Lr to transfer all those folder names to say the caption. With exiftool you might even be able to parse out say the event from them and put that into a keyword. Or geez, even use a plugin to send 'em to Google to run an image search on 'em and return them with labels/keywords and OCR'd text (AnyVision by John Ellis).

 

[v3rlon]

I wonder if anyone can suggest a convenient way to store and view my photo library.

For years, I've organized my photos as a bunch of folders, one folder for each year and within that a folder for every event where I take pictures in the formate YYMMDD-Event-Description. 85% of my photos are shot on my SLR and are raw files and for the files I work on a little bit, there's jpegs mixed into the folders. Another 10% of the photos are shot on my wife's iPhone and basically archived by year as one giant folder for each year. The rest of what I have is shot on my iPhone and to really complicate things, I've got a mix of photos I care about and photos of reminders, notes, price stickers in stores, labels from the backs of electronics, etc -- things I want to keep on my phone but I don't want in my photo archive.

I have photos this way going back about 10 years, around 600 gigs in total including videos mixed in.

I've recently bought a 2017 MBP and iPhone 7, so I can no longer store all my photos on the computer's limited internal storage and I'd like to have a library of my favourite photos mirror to my iPhone.

I don't even know where to begin trying to organize this, what I'd ideally like to have is a nice catalog with all my "good" edited photos showing and easy to browse as jpegs (and copied to my phone, mac mini and old MBP, and if possible shared to my wife's iPhone) along with all 600 gig of the photos available to easily accessible on my new mac along with the other photos.

I use Photoshop CS6 as my primary editing tool, but I also make extensive use of InDesign CS6 and I'm not willing to subscribe to CC. Lightroom 6 is not an option afaik because of the lack of RAW support for newer cameras. Photos doesn't seem to allow me to hide any photos and doesn't seem to have any good way to work with Photoshop.

Sorry this is so long, but I've also left out a ton of detail to keep it as short as I could. Thanks for any suggestions you can offer.

LR is a good option if you like that. I am trying ON1 Photo Raw now, and I like the fact that it leaves photos in place, but importing the 'good' ones into Apple Photos will mean duplicates (same problem with LR or C1 Pro as far as it goes).

You can have multiple libraries with photos. Have the 'good' library as the shared one and the big library on an external drive. You can hid Photos by using the "Hidden" folder. It isn't completely hidden, so those incriminating photos of you lusting after an Italian sports car or putting the ugly lamp on ebay will not be totally invisible, but they won't show up in the normal rotation.

 

[mollyc]

LR is a good option if you like that. I am trying ON1 Photo Raw now, and I like the fact that it leaves photos in place, but importing the 'good' ones into Apple Photos will mean duplicates (same problem with LR or C1 Pro as far as it goes).

I don't know anything about ON1 Photo Raw, so maybe it is the perfect solution in this case, but how does LR give you duplicates? You can import from the existing location if you already have the photos in a file structure you like.

 

[v3rlon]

I don't know anything about ON1 Photo Raw, so maybe it is the perfect solution in this case, but how does LR give you duplicates? You can import from the existing location if you already have the photos in a file structure you like.

I meant if you have the 'LR library' and then Import the good ones to Photos. You do not get the automatic sync to everything in Photos if you leave the images where they are for Photos.

 

[mollyc]

OH....I don't use Photos at all. Never have. I started with LR on a Windows machine and just stuck with it when I moved to the Mac platform nine years ago.

 

[v3rlon]

OH....I don't use Photos at all. Never have. I started with LR on a Windows machine and just stuck with it when I moved to the Mac platform nine years ago.

That was if talking about using LR (or something) for "All photos" and Photos as a "Good library" that is shared between all devices and family.

 

[DevNull0]

Yeah LR is hard work, the first time I tried it I went straight back to aperture, only when apple ended aperture support did i go back and give it another go...I still hated it...I then got that Scott Kelby book and persevered.

I know lots of pro's who just use bridge, and get by just fine.

For me, I sell some photos as stock so the ability to organise and rate is very useful.

I'm learning a bit more about it, but everything just feels like it's meant for some other kind of organizing. I only found out about stacks because I figured it must have a feature like that and I googled for "Lightroom group similar photos". Even then it feels clunky; I still haven't found out how to explore the photos in a stack without unstacking them. And I read it's supposed to sort the stacks based on your sort criteria and put the first one on top of the stack but I can't even find where to sort it. I'm not asking for help and I'll find it eventually; I just mean to say trying to learn it really is a horrible experience and a 7 day trial is a bad joke. I'm not giving up on it yet; I did stack my groups of images but so far it just feels like a clunkier harder to use and less functional version of bridge.

I've looked at Scott Kelby's book, but I remember seeing some of his videos a few weeks ago when I was researching this and he seems more interested in promoting Adobe's marketing message than helping your workflow; in particular his videos on the standalone vs CC versions of lightroom feel more like a shill than anyone worth listening to.
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What I do is have a folder for each year (2017), then nested down is each month (2017-01), nested within each file type (Raw/iPhone/GoPro). When I am done with the month and exporting, I make a final folder within each month for JPEG. I don't name by occasion, I name by date and camera (camera is easily sorted by metadata, but I regularly shoot with multiple cameras so I like to see that in the file name).

That makes a lot of sense; in particular there's time I'll pick up the camera and take 10-20 pictures just around the house and I have no idea how to file it with my system. And in my system, I file my SLR pictures as I said, my wifes iPhone pictures are in giant folders by year, and my iPhone pics are in tiny folders by year, so your way of handling multiple cameras make a lot more sense too.

The only thing I can think of though is if you're looking for pics of something specific and don't remember exactly which month it was since you don't have occasions labeled....like was the trip to the park in June or September last year, and which camera(s) did I take.

Still, I like the idea of a final folder with only your selected JPGs from all sources grouped together. That's a great idea.

I don't print a ton of photos individually, but I do print scrapbook pages, and for those I have a To Print folder and a Printed folder, and I will compile them in the first, and then when I have printed them, I drag them over to the Printed folder. I am wondering if something like that would work for you?

I print a ton individually, at the time, and right now I'm trying to go back over the year and make a huge photo book in InDesign of the year in review -- but my organization of photos is so bad I can't find the pics I want to include so the whole project has become tedious.

The nice thing about LR is that you can sort by so many metadata items to really find what you are looking for. And if you tag and keyword you can find things easily that way as well. Also, LR has a mobile side where you could sync among devices.

I tag in bridge by star rating and color, but I don't see myself assigning keywords or putting photos in multiple collections.

 

[mollyc]

Yes, but if you tag or use collections you won't need to worry about not having photos in a proper "folder." We got back from vacation a few days ago, and all the photos from all the cameras I used (two dSLRs, a phone, and a GoPro) are all in different folders based on the original file type, but are all tagged as Captiva, so I can just find them all in one click of that keyword.

Keywords seem confusing at first, but they are actually quite helpful if you use them consistently.

 

[DevNull0]

I'd say hang with Lr CC. Someday you're gonna lose CS6, and the Lr/Ps/Lr Mobile bundle is a great deal. Lr Mobile is really evolving fast; if you've got a mobile that can use it, then it would solve the issue with having a gallery of photos to carry around. It doesn't need JPEGs; it uses smart previews. So with RAW you could still edit them. And it has some very good editing tools; not Ps, but pretty nice for some stuff. BTW, Lr 6 gets all the raw processing updates of Lr CC. It lacks some tools like dehaze (global and local), and I think some prespective stuff, maybe HDR, etc.

You have a good point in that LR without the mobile bundle loses most of it's usefulness these days. But, I don't think I'm going to lose CS6 for a long time though. It's not just the LR/PS bundle for me since I'm not able to give up InDesign. I know this will have to change for me at some point, but for now I'd stop upgrading my OS for at least a few of years if Apple broke CS6 compatibility.

I do have an iPhone and iPad I'd to carry around the photo gallery on, and to be honest, the functionality is worth the $10/month if it works well. After 2 days of struggling with the LR trial, I still don't even see where the connection gets made between my catalog of 2500 test pictures on my Mac and the 200 or so I want to have show up in a nice gallery on my iPhone.

But aside from the applications, sounds like you have gotten stuck with a workflow that uses folders for organization, which is horrible. They should be the very last tool for organization, since they're very inflexible.

Exactly. And having 10 copies of some images in various formats (raw, psd, jpeg -- screen and print resolution) and various states of edit doesn't help either.

Much better is to use the metadata designed for images. That's why it's there. There's already a ton of info, like the dates. Camera. Lens. Exposure, F-stop, camera make, maybe geolocation. Bridge has rather rudimentary finding tools; Lr through filters can do much more.

So, for example, rather than a collection for each month, leave the catalog as a huge unsorted mess and the metadata will let me pull all pics from a certain month without bothering with collections? Then if I assign star ratings or a color to associate with a gallery, I've got everything I need? That makes a lot of sense.

The other info you added to your images, event and description, really didn't get added to them, but only to the folder they were in. Not ideal. But if that same event were a keyword, or even a caption or title, it would be much easier to find.

So again, rather than trying to add keywords to each file do it to a whole batch the same way I currently add them to a folder, and it's no more work than labelling my folder is now.

But for some printing (to say services) and other export tasks, the publishing feature of Lr is killer. It maintains a continung relationship with the images. So I keep, for example, a thumbdrive of exports I've printed. If I get a suggestion to change an image from someone I sent one such export to, I can re-edit in Lr, and have it export a new image to that thumbdrive to replace the old one. Or on Flickr or 500px or whatever.

Not sure I follow. If I give a friend a thumbdrive full of images I export, then I make changes, how do the changes get to their thumbdrive? I guess it automatically updates flickr or 500px if you give it your password which sounds pretty nice.
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I meant if you have the 'LR library' and then Import the good ones to Photos. You do not get the automatic sync to everything in Photos if you leave the images where they are for Photos.

That was if talking about using LR (or something) for "All photos" and Photos as a "Good library" that is shared between all devices and family.

This gets into something else I'm trying to do. It's pretty off topic and I don't want to hijack my own thread, so maybe this should have been a new thread.

Is it possible to use the cameras on my iphone and my wife's iphone and use iCloud photo library on the phones, but *not* have those photos taken directly show up in my "Photos" library. I want to import the photos from the phones to my mac, cull and edit them along with photos from DSLR, then on the mac load the selected photos into the Photos app and have *only those photos* show up in the libraries across all my and my wife's devices (currently 2 appleID accounts, but I'm willing to merge into a family account)?

I think if I switch to LR or continue with Bridge, that functionality from Photos is where I want to end up.

 

[mollyc]

LR has a mobile app and you can sync collections among devices.

 

[robgendreau]

Yeah, the thumbdrive only works if you get it back to update the published photos. But if you're using say a shared volume on a server, then you just update those, and then they're accessible to anyone on the LAN.

And BTW, you should look into smart objects in Lr. Makes it handy when passing stuff to other Adobe applications.

And labelling images is a lot easier than using folder categories. And you aren't forced into decisions like whether an image should go into folder x or folder y; with keywords, you can use both x and y on the same image. And keywords can be applied to say an event when you import with a preset (along with say camera calibration).

 

[v3rlon]

.




Is it possible to use the cameras on my iphone and my wife's iphone and use iCloud photo library on the phones, but *not* have those photos taken directly show up in my "Photos" library. I want to import the photos from the phones to my mac, cull and edit them along with photos from DSLR, then on the mac load the selected photos into the Photos app and have *only those photos* show up in the libraries across all my and my wife's devices (currently 2 appleID accounts, but I'm willing to merge into a family account)?

I think if I switch to LR or continue with Bridge, that functionality from Photos is where I want to end up.

Well it's POSSIBLE but you won't like it.

You can pause the uploads (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204264), the load images manually into the Mac, and cull there. Then clean off everything from the phone and bring in the improved version.

That still won't save you from taking a picture of that item in the store to look up on Amazon later.

 

[Stiksi]

I've been using Lightroom for all my photos, both professional and personal since they came out with the CC photography plan and I have to say it has gotten progressively more buggy year after year. At the moment I can't trust it to do its base task reliably. I've used LR on four computers and various versions and all have more or less the same problems.

- LR will lose RAW file adjustments after a couple months at the latest, so my workflow is pretty much shoot RAW, process in LR, export full size jpegs and scrap the RAW files because I don't have the time to process them again from scratch. Sometimes I still forget and curse Adobe as a result, just today I discovered that my holiday photos have reverted to default settings.

- LR can't handle large numbers of RAW files in a single folder, it frequently hangs if there are a couple thousand images in a single folder.

- LR can't move files reliably, some might get lost in the process, some might get corrupted (they have reportedly fixed this in the newest update but they have said that before), so moving files is better done in Finder and then reconnecting in LR.

- LR is unreliable in exporting files with adjustments unless you go through the whole list manually and make sure LR has loaded the adjustments by checking the thumbnails of each image before you export. This hurts timelapses the most. It takes me around half an hour to go through the 3000 images of a normal timelapse screen by screen and wait for the thumbnails to update.

These are pretty basic flaws but I am not aware of another app that claims to do the same tasks. That is also why these won't get fixed anytime soon. So beware and work around these flaws if you decide to go for it. LR 6 is probably somewhat better. The first versions on CC were more reliable.

 

[v3rlon]

I've been using Lightroom for all my photos, both professional and personal since they came out with the CC photography plan and I have to say it has gotten progressively more buggy year after year. At the moment I can't trust it to do its base task reliably. I've used LR on four computers and various versions and all have more or less the same problems.

- LR will lose RAW file adjustments after a couple months at the latest, so my workflow is pretty much shoot RAW, process in LR, export full size jpegs and scrap the RAW files because I don't have the time to process them again from scratch. Sometimes I still forget and curse Adobe as a result, just today I discovered that my holiday photos have reverted to default settings.

- LR can't handle large numbers of RAW files in a single folder, it frequently hangs if there are a couple thousand images in a single folder.

- LR can't move files reliably, some might get lost in the process, some might get corrupted (they have reportedly fixed this in the newest update but they have said that before), so moving files is better done in Finder and then reconnecting in LR.

- LR is unreliable in exporting files with adjustments unless you go through the whole list manually and make sure LR has loaded the adjustments by checking the thumbnails of each image before you export. This hurts timelapses the most. It takes me around half an hour to go through the 3000 images of a normal timelapse screen by screen and wait for the thumbnails to update.

These are pretty basic flaws but I am not aware of another app that claims to do the same tasks. That is also why these won't get fixed anytime soon. So beware and work around these flaws if you decide to go for it. LR 6 is probably somewhat better. The first versions on CC were more reliable.

Ouch! And I thought *I* didn't like LR.

Others tout the ability of LR to maintain large libraries. Is it possible you are using a plugin or method that is causing LR to act up? It is the industry standard for this, and I can't imagine they wouldn't have a mass exodus if everyone else had these same limitations.

Have you tried C1, ON1, or Aftershot?

They are different, but might help. ON1 just watches the folders you tell it to so you move things with finder if you like. I am trying it now (that sale price has it lower than a decent ND filter).

 

[robgendreau]

Yeah, I haven't experienced the Lr problems mentioned, but I've only exported say just under a hundred files at once, and maybe only a thousand in one folder, although maybe there were subfolders. And I've been using it since about Lr 3 and have never lost any edits. Not to diminish your problems, but that's not exactly most folks experience. As v3rlon notes, most of us would have bolted if we had these problems. I sure would; that's unacceptable.