BenRiceMHaving Lots of Photos is a F**king Nightmare
https://www.benricemccarthy.com/having-lots-of-photos-is-a-f-king-nightmare/
sborsje
Tom Watson
Penguin@BenRiceM Well said. I have 75K photos including old scans from 1973-1999 & digital camera photos from 1999-2015 when I switched to iPhone. My albums duplicate the folder structure on my iMac SSD so I have them locally as well. Biggest problem is constant change in Photos, I’m old & when I’m gone no-one will be taking care of my album structure anymore 🙁
@PenguinToot I think the only good solution to that problem is having prints 😛
@BenRiceM Ha, tried that in 1990’s, had print books in house to show visitors. Soon realized that didn’t work because who has time to look at them? And I know what happens to old print books, I have my parents’ & have no idea who’s in them 🙁
Geoffairey@BenRiceM @caseyliss you can use photos with a library on an external drive and sync it to iCloud. I do it.
@Geoffairey @caseyliss True, but I’d have to buy an SSD larger than 2TB, or use a HDD, which would be painfully slow
Edit: I did include that in a long list of all the pros and cons of each option in the first draft, but it didn’t seem as nice to read
Henrik Nyh@BenRiceM @Geoffairey @caseyliss And also you can’t access Photos on that machine if your laptop is away from the HDD, right?
And can you just un-hub and go or do you need to close Photos and unmount drives? Is that still a thing?
@henrik @Geoffairey @caseyliss thankfully my laptop isn’t my main machine, so it is happily set to Optimise Storage.
But Lightroom (and Aperture back in the day) handled ejecting the drive pretty smoothly
phongg@BenRiceM My solution is to store RAWs on a separate external SSD to use in Lightroom. They are simply too large (and expensive!) to store in iCloud.
Finalized JPGs will go into iCloud Photos and added into their own album if from a camera (If shot on my Sony camera, they will go into the "Sony" album group. Sub folders within the album separated by year. Very easy to set up on the mac with smart albums)
@phongg the problem is I never find myself sitting down at my desktop to do that processing, and the photos stay stuck in Lightroom
@BenRiceM I hear ya, I too have gotten lazy to edit photos over the years.
So what I've been doing is shooting in RAW+Jpeg and putting the (large/high quality) jpegs into iCloud. The quality is surprisingly good enough for just regular snapshots and anything that needs processing can always be added in later.
@phongg oh that’s a clever approach, I’ll have to consider that going forward
RJBME@phongg @BenRiceM I agree but I have found Lightroom, while not as feature rich as classic, to allow me the ability to do that editing that I wouldn’t or didn’t want to sit down at my computer to do. I often find myself doing some editing on an iPad and being happier with it than the jpeg. Replacing the SOOC jpeg in Photos with the edited and exporeted version is trivial.
@BenRiceM I’ve struggled with this too. My problem is that I don’t like Photos’ editing tools. My solution for now is to use Photos as my “shoebox”: I dump all my photos there: from iPhone, GoPro, and mirrorless jpegs. I shoot raw+jpeg and use Lightroom (not CC) and push any RAW photos that I want to edit into there for that work and export final edit into Photos. That way everything is visible and shareable to me. All my mirrorless RAW go onto an external SSD as well.
@rjbme having Darkroom on the Mac has helped, and while I haven’t used it much Pixelmator integrates with Photos pretty nicely.
Admittedly a lot of my editing is just using my own filters in Obscura
NMDoernerYikes!
Don't use #Apple Photos.app for tagging, it is a dead end:
https://www.cdfinder.de/blog/files/skip_apple_photos_app.html
@cdfinder I don’t really use tags, though I have filed Feedback with Apple about adding an API for third party access to keywords.
In Obscura I built a system for rating and flagging images by moving them in and out of dedicated albums, which is surprisingly effective, though limited, but at least it means those “tags” are accessible everywhere
Juan Villela@BenRiceM If Dropbox—arguably the worst piece of software currently in existence—can integrate with the Files app, I'm sure Photos can do a decent job if they truly cared.
Alex Pardoe@BenRiceM Maybe a question for a follow up blog post but how are you dealing with bringing across edits and metadata updates (like time changes and geotagging)?
@digitalpardoe ignoring metadata, I’ve never been one for tagging. I had some albums for events that it’ll be annoying but too difficult to replicate.
As for edits, I was exporting batches of originals, than filtering the same batch by whether images had edits, and exporting JPEGs of those, and adding both to Photos
@BenRiceM Fair enough, seems like the most efficient way of doing it.
I’ve been looking and doing it and wondered if there any tools out there that allow you to use the JPEG export and overlay it with the original photo using the various Photos “in place editing” APIs to make things a bit neater.
It seems like something fairly useful but niche enough I’ve not found anything.
@digitalpardoe it would be possible to build an app that adds the processed image as an edit, but if that meant going through each photo one-by-one, that sounds excruciating 😂
@BenRiceM 😄 Good point, it definitely need to be scripted up from a folder of originals and a folder of edits that’s for sure.
I did come across this a while ago but never got around to testing it: https://cyme.io/avalanche-photo-conversion/.
It makes a lot of claims about preserving edits in a native way.
@BenRiceM At this point I’m think I’m just holding off in the naive hope that maybe one day Aperture will come back.
@digitalpardoe you and me both 🥲
Ceolaf@BenRiceM I keep my entire Photos library on an extremely fast external SSD. It is all synced to iCloud photo library and backed up via time machine and back blaze.
Is it that you would like to have photos included in your iCloud photo library even though they are not stored in the Photos library? That is not an internal drive versus external drive issue.
@BenRiceM I am set up like this because of Apple’s price for internal storage and the size of my Photos library. I want originals that I can back up, so I need a lot of space.
This external SSD is faster than my previous computer’s internal SSD. Speed has not been a problem.
@ceolaf my full photo library is already larger than 4TB, and while I could live without immediate access to about half of that (a lot of it is conference photography jobs) I would still need SSDs larger than 2TB, which are pricy
@BenRiceM wanting split your media assets between locations — having some photos archived offline, but still in the catalogue — is a very advanced pro feature.
An old pro feature. But a pro feature nonetheless.
And Apple does not have a professional photo management product. Not anymore.
@ceolaf not exactly what I’m looking for. I’m effectively looking for a single library to be in both Optimise Storage (internal drive) and Download Originals (external drive) modes.
It’s been pointed out to me that this is possible if you create two user accounts signed into the same appleid, and sync two photo libraries to different places
Dr. Joe Sarsero, Ph.D.@BenRiceM My family’s workaround is to store optimised photos on our personal Macs but store full quality photos on a shared Mac mini that is also backed up.
However, we have almost exhausted our 4TB of iCloud Drive storage.
However, we have almost exhausted our 4TB of iCloud Drive storage.
@joesarsero that’s what I’m afraid of 😬
Graham Harper@joesarsero @BenRiceM we do similar with a shared Mac mini, but don’t keep everything in the iCloud library.
Instead I have an “Archive” Photos library on a drive attached to the Mac mini. Whenever iCloud gets full up I use PowerPhotos Merge feature to offload photos from the iCloud library to the Archive library. Then once I know they’re safely backed up, I just delete enough photos from the iCloud library to get me back under the limit.
@joesarsero @BenRiceM the draw back is that the Archive is offline and isn’t viewable from Photos app on devices, but I can log into the Mac mini remotely from any device and fire up the library that way.
Fausto Zanon@BenRiceM have you considered moving the system library of your desktop Mac to an external disk? You can then turn on Download and Keep Originals but save internal SSD space.
@fzanon yes, but I would still need an SSD larger than 2TB, which are expensive. I wouldn’t want to use a slow HDD to store the library itself
wiggywigaah@BenRiceM Love the idea of a redundant Photos backup!
Tom_Pagano@BenRiceM There is also an option in Photos to have your actual Photos library stored on an external drive so I can have the advantage of not actually filling up the Mac, but everything still gets synced to iCloud and you can back that up separately. But I guess if your primary Mac is a laptop that means you don’t have any access to your library when you are away from that external drive.
@tompagano Primary is desktop, but my Photo library is currently close to 2TB, and my *entire photo collection* (which is mostly work stuff, so I don’t need in my personal iCloud Photo Library) is over 4TB, so a suitable external SSD would be pricy.
And external HDD would be too slow.
What’s been suggested to me is to run the library with Optimise Storage enabled, and created a second user account (same AppleID) with the full library stored on an external HDD, so that’s what I’m going to try
@BenRiceM that’s a cool idea. Yeah I have a huge library as well, and bit the bullet on fast, larger external storage a while back. My library was big even before iCloud Photos was really a thing (back in the Aperture days!), and I never imagined I could seriously consider it as the main home for my photos. But I’m glad there is a workflow that could work now!