Sunday, 21st August, 2022
I can’t export lower quality JPEGs from the photos app on the iPad. I can use another program, like Darktable to do it. Although not sure saving to samba share via Files works as it comes up with some error. I looked into it before but the answer was either not obvious or required some faff. I know you can impersonate an Apple file share with samba which might work better.
Darktable app seems good, although you have to pay to use all the functions. It has a lifetime sub of £64 vs annual £20 charge. I like one off charges but am I really going to use it? It also doesn’t have an auto (at least one that’s not obvious to me). Which made me wonder if I need an auto. I like how it uses iCloud library and doesn’t require you to import photos into the app.
There’s probably many photo apps so I should look at them all first.
Jack suggested looking at Lightroom subscription. The one that appeals to me is the £10/month for Lightroom CC with. 1TB storage. That would fit all my photos, give me the ability to manage my library on mobile and desktop, plus have a very good photo editor. Now I don’t really do much editing but the syncing between devices including desktop is very appealing. Apple Photos.app only has favourites, whereas Lightroom has ratings. I generally only want two for maybe website plus printing but it’s handy to have. It’s a step away from iCloud photos so you have to import from photos app on iPad, however, I’m most likely to import on the desktop anyway. Having the desktop in sync is nice as then I can do the export from the desktop app and not have to worry about iOS persnicketiness. I could also export the good photos to my server for storage and then not worry about anything else. Really I should be deleting more anyway, if it’s not a good or great, why am I keeping it?
The 1TB is nice too. iCloud is £6.99/month for 2TB but of course no applications. I also don’t have a Mac desktop so it’s usefulness is limited. Other than photos I don’t really need to backup stuff that isn’t a few 100 MB (scans of documents etc). I do have some home videos but not many.
I think it’s worth giving it a go with the free trial. They do make you sign a 12 month contract regardless of if you pay once or monthly.
Here we are now in the evening and I’ve started the 7 day trial. It seems very promising. The one big hassle is importing my photos whilst maintaining a folder/album structure. Essentially I want to mirror my folder structure but with Albums in Lr. I might be able to do it if I first import into LrC then migrate it, but currently I have to make each album individually then import the photos. It’s pretty slow going…Once everything historical is in then it’s not a big deal going forward.
I like the organisation/library view and controls. It’s very minimal but with just what I want. I’ve only been importing so not tried any editing. I did a few of the tutorials built in that walk you though editing a photo and so far it seems like it has a decent amount of editing functionality. Some of the sharing features are quite nice, just a quick share of an album to people if they wanted to get a copy of the images. However, one thing I’m interested in is the blurb and the Adobe Portfolio integration. I used blurb to make a photo book for my mum using my Grandad’s slide photos and it was a nice tool to use and a reasonable price. With the integration I can send the highlights to a project to then load into a book, so I could add stuff all during the year as I go, and then the final build isn’t such a huge ordeal. I’m sure LrC had it and other programs but I never used them.
Adobe Portfolio is also interesting, and I’m considering using it to replace my family photos site. Mostly for the convenience of it all. I don’t even have to make albums in Lightroom, as all the images are in Adobe cloud I can just make a new one whenever and add the images I want. There’s a few built-in themes and they’re perfectly suitable. It’s like editing with Wordpress. I assume it either uses my adobe cloud storage, or if I’m using photos from my Lightroom library it doesn’t use up any additional space. Basically means I have up to a 1TB web library 😅. You can also use custom domains for free. Pretty much everything I want!
I might make a photography blog site with it too…
Or I’m just all excited and getting carried away with it. But now my workflow would be:
- Copy photos to folder structure
- Delete obvious duds
- Import into Lightroom
- Rate them
- Edit if necessary
- Upload to website
- Add to this year’s photo album book
- Enjoy all that extra free time to waste on something else 😂
📸
I just opened the iOS app on my iPad. I need to check, but I think it has different/more features than the desktop one? Lots of AI stuff, which seem pretty neat for suggested profiles and masks etc. Maybe I will spend time editing on my iPad. Sort of conflicts with my desire to try and just use SOOC jpegs for mostly everything. So my brain is then “oh so you could get a MFT camera cos you’re not relying on Fujifilm anymore”, then I remind it that I LITERALLY JUST BOUGHT A NEW FUJIFILM CAMERA! Brain whispers “maybe the MFT could be used for sports photography”. 🤫🧠🤯 I’m just excited about it. I don’t really want to edit all the photos every time. Maybe 5⭐️ ones I might try something else out to improve it.
