Help me with what photo apps to use (Lightroom, Apple Photos)

[jboolean]

My photo life has been a mess since Apple discontinued iPhoto and Aperture. Back in the day, I loved being meticulous with organizing my photos into Events and tagging People etc. The editing features of Aperture were good.

I'm a hobbyist, not a pro, but love fiddling with the editing photos from occasional DSLR shoots, as well as having a way to organize phone photos and scans from my film shooting.

I switch to working in Lightroom (now Classic) in 2020. My current workflow is to import all photos, including photos shot on my Android phone in here. I love the editing tools, such as masked edits. Not so much the organization features, which are basically folders you have to do manually. It's terrible at organizing random photos shot with my phone. I feel like I'm still living in 2006 with my workflow basically being to take photos off the camera or phone and onto the computer, with no cloud syncing or way to see the photos on the phone again.
Yeah, I have an Android phone now (yeah this is MacRumors, still a Mac fan but my last iPhone was the 4), but never signed up for Google Photos as it looks like a joke (there's not even a desktop app). My next phone may be an iPhone if moving fully back to the Apple world would help.


I guess my question is this: what combination of tools to folks like when sometimes you want to do more "pro" shoots and serious processing that the pro tools provide, and sometimes you just take random phone shots where tools like Apple Photos really shine at organization and auto-syncing? Do you maintain two libraries and export/import photos between them?

The only suggest I've had so far is to import into Lighttroom for editing, then export to Photos for organization. Oy.

 

[hbruss]

I use Photoshop, Lightroom, Topaz and Flickr (Flickr for organizing photos into albums).

 

[cupcakes2000]

Nothing I have come accross is a good option for organising the randomness of phone photos. I use lrc for my normal cameras and just Apple photos for my phone. If I want to edit a phone pic in LR (not classic) it’s pretty good for picking it, and then I export it and put it into classic into my ‘proper’ collection if I feel the need.

 

[_timo_redux_]

I don't know if it helps, but I just gave up on Photos.app as a catalog. For me, it just warehouses iPhone photos that I take, or receive e.g., in a text message.

I look through it every now and then and export pictures I might want to keep to a folder on my desktop, where I fold these pictures into my photo editing process: geotag (I just check the iPhone photos; they're usually OK), import to a monthly session in Capture One; at the end of the month fold the session into a larger catalog. There the iPhone photos just live with the other pictures from other cameras.

 

[doctorwho1130]

What about Photomator (it's from the Pixelmator team, which was recently acquired by Apple)

 

[Jumpthesnark]

I use Photo Mechanic, then Lightroom Classic. Occasionally Photoshop if I'm doing something complex with layers.

I organize my photos into folders by date, and use PM to edit, cull, rename, sort and add metadata so photos are searchable. This allows me to use MacOS's finder to do my searches, and I'm not dependent on a certain piece of software to organize my photos. Then I back them up to multiple drives, which I store locally.

I stay away from the Photos app because I want to be in control of filenames, storage, metadata, etc. and I want to be able to open a folder in a finder and know exactly which are my best photos, without ever having to open an image.