Apple Some Mac-based options for photo management and editing, not in the cloud

[L0n3Gr3yW0lf]

Despite many years of being a Windows user / beta tester / MS Partner / MS Insider, I have zero regrets about moving to Apple. Everything feels so much simpler and easier. Couple of caveats (aside from the cost):
1. it took me almost a year to find apps / programs to reproduce my old Winter workflows,
2. to reap the benefits of the Apple eco-system means going 'all in' on the hardware: phones, tablets and desktops and a lot of the software. The only core default app I replaced was the calendar which compared to a lot of the Android apps is a bit basic.

However, even the low end Apple devices work very well so don't be reluctant to get the starter iPad Air or an SE iPhone or a second hand Mini or anything refurbished straight from Apple.

Definitely go with iCloud for backing up the devices even if it means upgrading to the 2TB service. AirDrop is possibly my favourite feature though: transferring anything between devices just works.

And despite my criticisms above, Photos is a great app for managing images and movies on the portable devices.

I'm a bit weary with older/lower-end stack of Apple products because of the 2 devices I have tried, which were the iPad 9.7" 2017 (new for 270 £) and the iPhone 8 (used for 350 £) and both were struggling with RAM, especially the iPad where having more than 3 browser tabs I would lose all the content on webpages that were not active and I couldn't use Google Now/Search to keep up with the news (it's my favourite thing to read articles on subjects I am interested in) because it would crash and refresh every time I would finish reading an article and I would lose pages and pages of articles when the app would restart (I know that's more of a Google's fault but still).

I am, most likely, going to start slow with M1 Mac Mini until I get used to macOS, M1 iPad Pro for mobile editing and sharing, an iPhone 11 or 11 Pro when I have enough capital to spend on a 2nd hand one and if things go well I will consider the better machines afterwards. I would prefer to have a macOS device and an iPad at the same time to use the ability to mirror the MacOS on the iPad for comfort editing, like on the couch. I would like a 32GB RAM device because I really do enjoy a hundred MegaPickleRicks and even GigaPickleRicks panoramas but they are so damn expensive. I told myself I will never sell the Asus ZenBook Pro Duo but maybe I might fund the migration at some point.

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

I'm a bit weary with older/lower-end stack of Apple products because of the 2 devices I have tried, which were the iPad 9.7" 2017 (new for 270 £) and the iPhone 8 (used for 350 £) and both were struggling with RAM, especially the iPad where having more than 3 browser tabs I would lose all the content on webpages that were not active and I couldn't use Google Now/Search to keep up with the news (it's my favourite thing to read articles on subjects I am interested in) because it would crash and refresh every time I would finish reading an article and I would lose pages and pages of articles when the app would restart (I know that's more of a Google's fault but still).

I am, most likely, going to start slow with M1 Mac Mini until I get used to macOS, M1 iPad Pro for mobile editing and sharing, an iPhone 11 or 11 Pro when I have enough capital to spend on a 2nd hand one and if things go well I will consider the better machines afterwards. I would prefer to have a macOS device and an iPad at the same time to use the ability to mirror the MacOS on the iPad for comfort editing, like on the couch. I would like a 32GB RAM device because I really do enjoy a hundred MegaPickleRicks and even GigaPickleRicks panoramas but they are so damn expensive. I told myself I will never sell the Asus ZenBook Pro Duo but maybe I might fund the migration at some point.

Apple devices are more aggressive to flush idle RAM. They also do a cleaning of sorts while they charge. These seem like odd behaviors at first, but I believe this is done to help keep the OS super-stable and help maintain very good battery life. On MacOS Safari, it's not uncommon to see a message at the top of an idle browser tab that says "This page was using a large amount of resources and has been refreshed" or something similar. It's the OS's way of managing apps and sites that are consuming excessive resources, even when idle.

 

[discus277]

@wt21 I read your original post probably two weeks ago and then followed the thread for several days. It really got me thinking. I have the LR subscription now so I played with Apple Photos for several days on my iPad to learn what was going on and found I really liked it. I started my LR subscription late in 2017 and had abut 7000 images in LR Classic on my PC plus another 1000 or so on iPad Pro in the Lightroom for iPad application. I have Windows 10 now.

One thing that was bothering me. If I dropped LR, what would be a good way to cull my images before letting Photos get them? I have been very poor at culling with Lightroom and thus had cluttered it up with a lot of duplicates and RAW plus JPEG. I started looking and what did I discover? Adobe Bridge! I don't recall any other poster mentioning this amazing piece of FREE software. I am almost ashamed to admit that I had never looked at it. I watched a YOUTUBE video of a professional wedding photographer using it to screen (cull) images before he started his editing workflow. Wow. The software is perfect for this.

First thing I did was put it to work on my Lightroom Photos and deleted over 2800 images from my desktop version of LR. This had the unexpected additional benefit of giving me space back in Adobe's Cloud storage since I have not upgraded from the free 20 GB. Now, LR photos on my laptop are again synching again with my iPad.

I also confirmed that with the free version of Adobe Bridge you get Adobe Camera Raw free. No requirement to have Photoshop. In operation of Adobe Bridge you can set in preferences to double click to open Adobe Camera raw. I experimented with that several times during my purging operation. It works just like the editing panel in LR and is very fast. I tried it on both Olympus RAW and Fuji RAW files. It works great albeit that some of the fancier editing (as with masks) is not there in Adobe Camera Raw.

So where does this leave me. I am going to continue on the path of eliminating my LR/ Photoshop subscription when my year is up in November. I like the idea of buying completely into the Apple system. My wife and I both have iPhones and iPads and love them. Having a MBP for my desktop would complete the picture. I can see using Photos for photo management. However, alternatively, I think it would be very easy to set up a simple Folder structure following the structure I currently use with LR. That is: Light Room Photos > Year > Month . For example, in the top folder >2022 > 03-17 St. Patrick's Day Parade. Very simple, and I think you could include it in your Apple iCloud backup.

So glad I happened to catch your original post a couple weeks ago

 

[Glevum Owl]

@wt21 I read your original post probably two weeks ago and then followed the thread for several days. It really got me thinking. I have the LR subscription now so I played with Apple Photos for several days on my iPad to learn what was going on and found I really liked it. I started my LR subscription late in 2017 and had abut 7000 images in LR Classic on my PC plus another 1000 or so on iPad Pro in the Lightroom for iPad application. I have Windows 10 now.

One thing that was bothering me. If I dropped LR, what would be a good way to cull my images before letting Photos get them? I have been very poor at culling with Lightroom and thus had cluttered it up with a lot of duplicates and RAW plus JPEG. I started looking and what did I discover? Adobe Bridge! I don't recall any other poster mentioning this amazing piece of FREE software. I am almost ashamed to admit that I had never looked at it. I watched a YOUTUBE video of a professional wedding photographer using it to screen (cull) images before he started his editing workflow. Wow. The software is perfect for this.

First thing I did was put it to work on my Lightroom Photos and deleted over 2800 images from my desktop version of LR. This had the unexpected additional benefit of giving me space back in Adobe's Cloud storage since I have not upgraded from the free 20 GB. Now, LR photos on my laptop are again synching again with my iPad.

I also confirmed that with the free version of Adobe Bridge you get Adobe Camera Raw free. No requirement to have Photoshop. In operation of Adobe Bridge you can set in preferences to double click to open Adobe Camera raw. I experimented with that several times during my purging operation. It works just like the editing panel in LR and is very fast. I tried it on both Olympus RAW and Fuji RAW files. It works great albeit that some of the fancier editing (as with masks) is not there in Adobe Camera Raw.

So where does this leave me. I am going to continue on the path of eliminating my LR/ Photoshop subscription when my year is up in November. I like the idea of buying completely into the Apple system. My wife and I both have iPhones and iPads and love them. Having a MBP for my desktop would complete the picture. I can see using Photos for photo management. However, alternatively, I think it would be very easy to set up a simple Folder structure following the structure I currently use with LR. That is: Light Room Photos > Year > Month . For example, in the top folder >2022 > 03-17 St. Patrick's Day Parade. Very simple, and I think you could include it in your Apple iCloud backup.

So glad I happened to catch your original post a couple weeks ago

Thank you! How easy it is to overlook the blindingly obvious. I've been using XNView to pre-sort images before import into LR. I have no intentions currently of moving away from LR as I rely too much on so many of its functions but I'll certainly start using Bridge to weed out the bad 'uns.

 

[John King]

@wt21 I read your original post probably two weeks ago and then followed the thread for several days. It really got me thinking. I have the LR subscription now so I played with Apple Photos for several days on my iPad to learn what was going on and found I really liked it. I started my LR subscription late in 2017 and had abut 7000 images in LR Classic on my PC plus another 1000 or so on iPad Pro in the Lightroom for iPad application. I have Windows 10 now.

One thing that was bothering me. If I dropped LR, what would be a good way to cull my images before letting Photos get them? I have been very poor at culling with Lightroom and thus had cluttered it up with a lot of duplicates and RAW plus JPEG. I started looking and what did I discover? Adobe Bridge! I don't recall any other poster mentioning this amazing piece of FREE software. I am almost ashamed to admit that I had never looked at it. I watched a YOUTUBE video of a professional wedding photographer using it to screen (cull) images before he started his editing workflow. Wow. The software is perfect for this.

First thing I did was put it to work on my Lightroom Photos and deleted over 2800 images from my desktop version of LR. This had the unexpected additional benefit of giving me space back in Adobe's Cloud storage since I have not upgraded from the free 20 GB. Now, LR photos on my laptop are again synching again with my iPad.

I also confirmed that with the free version of Adobe Bridge you get Adobe Camera Raw free. No requirement to have Photoshop. In operation of Adobe Bridge you can set in preferences to double click to open Adobe Camera raw. I experimented with that several times during my purging operation. It works just like the editing panel in LR and is very fast. I tried it on both Olympus RAW and Fuji RAW files. It works great albeit that some of the fancier editing (as with masks) is not there in Adobe Camera Raw.

So where does this leave me. I am going to continue on the path of eliminating my LR/ Photoshop subscription when my year is up in November. I like the idea of buying completely into the Apple system. My wife and I both have iPhones and iPads and love them. Having a MBP for my desktop would complete the picture. I can see using Photos for photo management. However, alternatively, I think it would be very easy to set up a simple Folder structure following the structure I currently use with LR. That is: Light Room Photos > Year > Month . For example, in the top folder >2022 > 03-17 St. Patrick's Day Parade. Very simple, and I think you could include it in your Apple iCloud backup.

So glad I happened to catch your original post a couple weeks ago

Jim, Schewe & Fraser wrote "Real World Adobe Camera Raw" just for you (and me ... ). It devotes some 70 pages of its 450 pages just to Bridge! Bridge and ACR are very powerful tools. I have never been able to get my head around Lightroom, and I've been a computer consultant/troubleshooter of last resort for about 50 years ...

I consider Photoshop an add on to ACR and Bridge, not the other way around.

I also highly recommend "Scott Kelby's Seven Point System for Adobe Photoshop". It's the only one of his books that I do recommend.

Another practice I recommend is to put every single image folder under a head folder named "_All_Images". This makes backup and everything else just so much easier. I have separate sub-folders for all my phones, tablets, camera bodies, scans. How you organise things after that is up to you. We're all different!

Do not neglect the command in Bridge that allows you to display all photos from all sub-folders in a single head folder. This makes keywording and browsing so very simple.

Bridge is enormously powerful, and grossly underestimated, when it's not ignored completely ...