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Author Topic: Apple's Photos for D.A.M. ?  (Read 2954 times)

Stidik

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Apple's Photos for D.A.M. ?
« on: June 11, 2019, 01:39:36 am »

 Does anyone use Apple's Photos program for DAM?  I was a big fan of Aperture,  but reluctantly switched over to light room.  I like their raw development program but hate their archival system.  Going on vacation for a couple weeks and working with photos on a laptop then merging those photos and catalogs with my home computer is it times difficult.  I know Photos is not a professional program,  and one big drawback is not having a star rating system. Does anyone know of other major drawbacks?   Most of my images start as 24 megapixel raw, but my developed photos have large file sizes after raw developing in light room and then multiple edits in Photoshop before printing. The newest  iPhone has a pretty amazing camera for still photos and video and it keeps getting better and I plan to use it more often.
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peterwgallagher

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Re: Apple's Photos for D.A.M. ?
« Reply #1 on: June 11, 2019, 05:47:33 am »

In a word: “disappointing”. If not now, then sooner or later.

The image organisation of Photos is probably good for people who take lots of iPhone snaps and are happy to search them by year or month or face or place. But it’s really terrible for organising images that you want to store, catalog, add meta-data and find again when you need to based on e.g. rating or title or keywords or colour or processing or EXIF data (lens, aperture, camera) or some combination of all of these.

Photos is mostly an Apple device for selling bigger iCloud subscriptions and, to some extent, printed photo books.

A real pity, in my view, because the image processing available in Photos is very good, even in ‘auto’ mode, for single images (no HDR, bracket-fusing or panorama controls — although you can add them through external hooks to other programs).

If you have LR then you can download Adobe Bridge for free and use that to accession and catalog your collection in many different ways (even if you cancel your LR subscription, you can go on using Bridge).

Then, to use Photos with Bridge, just tell Photos (in the Preferences) to populate it’s database by REFERENCE to your Bridge-organised photos on the disk. Photos will store meta-data rather than the original image file in its database. Should work OK as a hybrid.

Best, Peter
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gfsymon

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Re: Apple's Photos for D.A.M. ?
« Reply #2 on: June 21, 2019, 05:15:35 am »

Does anyone use Apple's Photos program for DAM?

Good news may be on the way, for those that appreciated Aperture for it's DAM as well as its RAW processing.

Nik Bhatt, ex-lead of Aperture, quietly launched RAW Power a couple of years back.  (Excellent app).  This year's Apple Developers conference may have set him on course to build Aperture like DAM features into RAW Power.  Basically, Apple have opened up access for developers, to Photos' database.  Seems to me that this could have pretty wide implications for Apple's image handling.  Photos' Extensions were already interesting, but largely useless to pros, because you had to use Photos.  So ... *perhaps* this move will mean that you store your images in Photos *but* you don't have to actually use Photos at all.  However, should you want to access an image in Photos, in order to use an Extension ... well ... you can.  There are 2 types of Extension.  Image editing and 'Services' like photo books.

The really interesting part for Aperture users that appreciated its superb DAM, is that Nik could be providing a way forward for them.  Photos can read and convert Aperture Libraries.  It also retains metadata, even if Photos doesn't support it. It's in there, you just can't edit/add to it.  So it could be that you convert an Aperture Library to Photos, which will retain all info and then, with an app like RAW Power, continue to operate in pretty much the same way that you did in Aperture (especially as Nik has retained the essence of the Aperture UI for RAW Power ... with one big exception ... he explains really well what all the tools do!)

To be honest, I don't think there can be anyone better than Nik Bhatt to do this.  He knows this stuff inside out and has shown himself to have a very methodical approach (not much of a surprise for a lead engineer at Apple).  The first iteration will probably have star ratings according to what he's hinted on Twitter.  Personally, for the DAM, there are not all that many things that are essential to me, so I'm hopeful they'll all get in there.  Photos already 'sort of' caters to Aperture's excellent, but very misunderstood, Managed/Referenced feature and *I think* that part of the advantage of the APFS file system that Apple recently switched to, is that an app like Photos, won't loose files that have been moved.  It keeps track.  (Of course, this is good for any app including Lr).  At the moment, Photos will let you use Referenced images, but will not 'move' the actual images when Consolidating them into the Photos Library, instead it makes a copy and also, you can't choose to move images which are Managed in the Photos library, out of it, to be Referenced.

Anyway ... very exciting for those of us who tried and didn't like Lr for DAM, so stuck with Aperture, only to find that although it is 64bit, it's not going to run in 10.15 Catalina.  We may just get saved at the last gasp.

Maybe give him some encouragement on Twitter?

https://twitter.com/gentcoders/status/1138551424051138560

https://gentlemencoders.com
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