Aperture failing - Lightroom and AppleTV question

[jz0309]

my specific question first:
1. How does Lightroom (either CC or classic) perform when wanting to see photos on TV? I know there is an AppleTV app
2. I was able to import a folder incl subfolders (year plus months in subfolders) in 1 step in classic, have not seen that functionality in CC, can that be done? (I have about 30 folders with years plus months and events as subfolders, so this would be a huge deal for me)

My story:
Have been using Aperture since 2008, have ~ 70k photos (raw, TIFF and JPG) and have been using it successfully til ~ 2 weeks ago on the latest Mojave. Then I tried to add ~900 photos from my daughters graduation and it started crashing on me. I had moved most of my originally managed library into referenced, folders by year, subfolders by month/event.

I had been playing with Photos as a replacement and was hoping to spend some time over the xmas break to work on that. I tried rebuilding to database with no success. So I tried to rebuild my library in Photos, and ran into problems: I imported ~ 55k photos, it crashed on me once while i was letting it sit over night, and when i was trying to rotate some photos after import, it didn't work ... so I rebuild the database, and while i could rotate the photos, it lost all face recognition info . I manually created folders for each year and imported the subfolders as albums.

So now I am trying the 7 day trial of Lightroom CC, installed CC as well as classic CC and i am liking everything i'm seeing so far. I like the interface of CC over classic so far, but what impressed me with classic is that it looks I will be able to import my folder structure straight in, whereas with CC i might have to manually create folders.
So far I'm just trying out my 2018 photos, ~ 2.5k.
What I liked about Aperture and Photos is the ability to look at photos on the TV via AppleTV, that's a requirement now as it is the only viable way to share photos with family

While I'm not excited about the subscription model, and I don't care about the cloud feature (I picked the photography w/20GB), I am willing to pull the plug on Lightroom, will have to make a decision by this Sunday.

Any comments feedback in addition to my questions at the top will be appreciated

 

[mpfuchs]

I'm not familiar with most of what you're asking, but I found this:
https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/help/setup-lightroom-tv.html
Looks to me like the Apple TV app would only work with Lightroom CC, and only with items you have stored in the cloud, or allow access to via the cloud.
I'm assuming it would use the same shared cloud library that you would also have access to with the iPhone or iPad app of Lightroom CC.

 

[MCAsan]

Do you want a managed library or a referenced library to replace the Aperture library (which is managed by default)? Lightroom Classic only does referenced libraries that point to folders in the file system. Lr CC is like Aperture by wanting to images into a database.

Capture One Pro is one of the few apps that will give you a choice of a managed or referenced library.

 

[jz0309]

I'm not familiar with most of what you're asking, but I found this:
https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/help/setup-lightroom-tv.html
Looks to me like the Apple TV app would only work with Lightroom CC, and only with items you have stored in the cloud, or allow access to via the cloud.
I'm assuming it would use the same shared cloud library that you would also have access to with the iPhone or iPad app of Lightroom CC.

Thanks for the link, it certainly looks that you are right, only cloud stored photos, unfortunately not what i had in mind
[doublepost=1546619662][/doublepost]

Do you want a managed library or a referenced library to replace the Aperture library (which is managed by default)? Lightroom Classic only does referenced libraries that point to folders in the file system. Lr CC is like Aperture by wanting to images into a database.

Capture One Pro is one of the few apps that will give you a choice of a managed or referenced library.

Thanks, given my Aperture experience I'd prefer a referenced library ... it appears that CC supports that as I have been able to import my 2018 plus subfolders photos and it only appears to store previews in a library ...

 

[mpfuchs]

Thanks for the link, it certainly looks that you are right, only cloud stored photos, unfortunately not what i had in mind
[doublepost=1546619662][/doublepost]
Thanks, given my Aperture experience I'd prefer a referenced library ... it appears that CC supports that as I have been able to import my 2018 plus subfolders photos and it only appears to store previews in a library ...

Here is another that goes into a little more detail:
https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/help/view-lightroom-photos-collections-apple-tv.html
Not sure exactly how you're planning on sharing, but looks like you could create specific albums to be shared on the Apple TV, and then just point to them on the TV set. This way you could even have different albums setup on different Apple TVs.

Long time ago when I used Aperture (which I loved btw), I bought into the managed library system.
In the end, I had a library, that was so big, it wasn't fun to work with. Then somehow it got corrupted and it was a royal pain to get my images back out of it. The mistake on my part, I didn't keep my backups up to date, so I lost part of my photos.
When I started using Lightroom, I decided to only point to my photos on the hard drive, and the Lightroom library would only take care of any edits. That way in case of a corrupted library, I would only lose edits, but not pictures.
I also like that I only have the library on my MacBook whereas the photos are stored on a external hard drive.
With the previews stored in the library, I can still see my pictures (resolution depends on type of your previews) and edit them. Once I print or export, I plug the external hard drive in, and I'm all set. I guess this would not be an issue on a desktop work station.

But this is one of the things, where each use case is different, and you need to decide which is best for you.

EDIT:
Here is a quote from that page linked above:

• The Albums view shows all the Folders and Albums that have been synced/uploaded to the cloud from Lightroom CC on your desktop, mobile, web, or Lightroom Classic CC on desktop.

So it looks like you can create albums with the intention to share to Apple TV with both versions.
The albums would just have to be smaller than your 20GB cloud allowance. So you might not be able to share your whole library.
The good news here is, you don't have to store your whole library in the cloud, but can decide which albums/folders you want to upload to the cloud to be shared with.
It is my understanding, that with Lightroom CC, your whole library is stored in the cloud. Not on your hard drive. Please correct me if I'm wrong on this!

 

[jz0309]

Here is another that goes into a little more detail:
https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/help/view-lightroom-photos-collections-apple-tv.html
Not sure exactly how you're planning on sharing, but looks like you could create specific albums to be shared on the Apple TV, and then just point to them on the TV set. This way you could even have different albums setup on different Apple TVs.

Long time ago when I used Aperture (which I loved btw), I bought into the managed library system.
In the end, I had a library, that was so big, it wasn't fun to work with. Then somehow it got corrupted and it was a royal pain to get my images back out of it. The mistake on my part, I didn't keep my backups up to date, so I lost part of my photos.
When I started using Lightroom, I decided to only point to my photos on the hard drive, and the Lightroom library would only take care of any edits. That way in case of a corrupted library, I would only lose edits, but not pictures.
I also like that I only have the library on my MacBook whereas the photos are stored on a external hard drive.
With the previews stored in the library, I can still see my pictures (resolution depends on type of your previews) and edit them. Once I print or export, I plug the external hard drive in, and I'm all set. I guess this would not be an issue on a desktop work station.

But this is one of the things, where each use case is different, and you need to decide which is best for you.

EDIT:
Here is a quote from that page linked above:


So it looks like you can create albums with the intention to share to Apple TV with both versions.
The albums would just have to be smaller than your 20GB cloud allowance. So you might not be able to share your whole library.
The good news here is, you don't have to store your whole library in the cloud, but can decide which albums/folders you want to upload to the cloud to be shared with.
It is my understanding, that with Lightroom CC, your whole library is stored in the cloud. Not on your hard drive. Please correct me if I'm wrong on this!

It is my understanding, that with Lightroom CC, your whole library is stored in the cloud. Not on your hard drive. Please correct me if I'm wrong on this! CC actually lets you store locally, but I have not found a way set-up a specific folder structure, instead it stores it like this:

not all that bad, but not what I want.
So I think what I will do going forward is use Classic to organize and edit photos in my preferred folder structure, sync to cloud cc those I do want to share with others, and use Photos (importing the photos from the folder structure) to share via AppleTV. Yea, certainly more work than Aperture alone, and addl storage required for Photos, but I'm not constrained on storage (yet).

 

[robgendreau]

Since you already have a folder structure, having used Aperture with referenced images, I'd say going forward you'd find the transition to the folder-based Classic easier. And bonus: it has a lot more functionality at this point. And you haven't mentioned synching across tons of devices as being a priority.

Note that you can synch from Classic to CC; it uses smart previews and those don't count against storage limits. I don't have an Apple TV, but from what is referenced above it might be that those smart previews would show up just fine in the TV app and hence on your HDTV. Be easier to do that than using Photos (I do use Photos that way, and it's kind of a pain if you need to make changes later; the benefit of using Classic to CC is that any changes propagate across the system).

Another way I show images on the TV is via a thumbdrive. I set up a collection publishing system so that I can send a bunch of say family photos to the thumbdrive, and then I just slam it into the TV and use it's builtin slide show function to play the images. All local; nothing online. It's easy to change either an individual photo, the order, what's included, etc via Lr's publishing functions.

 

[jz0309]

Note that you can synch from Classic to CC; it uses smart previews and those don't count against storage limits. .

That is interesting. As I'm in the process of importing I have checked the "create smart previews" box, I will try that out once I have a sizable number of photos and back from my biz trip - Thanks for the tip