Lightroom and Photos workflow

[Danfango]

Trying to work out a reasonable workflow for working with Apple Photos app and Lightroom with respect to editing, storage, backup and distribution of images. I have an iPhone, Z50 and Scanner as sources. I shoot in RAW on the Z50, HEIC on the iPhone and mostly JPEG from the scanner. None of the sources are "professional" i.e. this is 100% leisure so there are no divisions between libraries anywhere. The outputs are shared galleries in Photos for family, print and Instagram mostly. I do some casual editing on my phone occasionally but mostly stuff into Lightroom

I was using Photos app and have about 10,000 images in there. But I've started moving stuff into Lightroom Classic slowly. Of course I shot myself the other day because I was out and about and wanted to share something with someone and of course it was in the Lightroom library on the mac at home. Doh!

And then there's the problem of backing up the Lightroom library. I have a basic backup system which involves keeping everything in icloud as the first line backup (photo library + documents) and two second line backups, one done weekly with Time machine and one done quarterly and kept at another physical location via Time machine. But that doesn't cover Lightroom within the weekly window or if the house burns down.

If anyone has any magic workflows they would like to share or ideas on how to solve these problems I would be grateful.

So problems:

1. How do I back up lightroom into iCloud? I have moved the folders into icloud drive but not the catalogue.
2. How do I manage a workflow like this?
3. How can I simplify my life a little

 

[mollyc]

I've never used Photos, and I personally wouldn't trust iCloud to keep my LR photos. I don't use iCloud photos at all actually.

I have my own website where I host images I want to share, and it also works as a secondary backup (for jpeg only) for finished images. I otherwise backup via a NAS raid system at home.

I don't think there is an easy way to manage what you accomplish by using two different photo programs to manage photos, unless you export jpegs out of LR and then import them into Photos on a regular basis (which is essentially what my goal is with my website but I'm about a year behind 🙄).

 

[Danfango]

That's roughly where I am now. Anything that comes from the iPhone goes into Photos and anything from the DSLR goes into Lightroom. I am exporting, post processing and selection, into Photos as it's easier to share from there. I have a web site as well but the day job is looking after infrastructure which I don't want to take home with me

I'm not really a big fan of Photos either but it's extremely convenient and it handles videos and generic family stuff very well. Also when posting to social media it's the gold standard of image sources from an iPhone.

 

[mollyc]

Depending on who you host your site with, you might be able to publish directly from LR with little hassle. SmugMug (who I use) has a plugin that works where you basically set up a collection and then click Publish and it automagically goes directly to SM. It takes a little work upfront to get the gallery defaults set, but once you have that it is super easy....I just got behind in never finishing the edits from our vacation last week and then never cleared out that one month's folder to publish. I hope to get them all over to SM in the next couple of weeks now that my kids are done with school.

 

[mollyc]

Also when posting to social media it's the gold standard of image sources from an iPhone.

I have literally no idea when photos are posted via Photos or not....To be honest, I'm not even sure what that statement means...

 

[Danfango]

I have literally no idea when photos are posted via Photos or not....To be honest, I'm not even sure what that statement means...

Sorry that was a crap sentence. My bad. The workflow for posting on social media is tuned to posting from a mobile device from the Photos library. I tend to post a mix of iPhone and DSLR shots on there based on what I had at hand. Uploading from the web after a Lightroom export is clunky as anything.

You also get a better indication of the colour reproduction of the audience on mobile devices.

 

[Danfango]

Depending on who you host your site with, you might be able to publish directly from LR with little hassle. SmugMug (who I use) has a plugin that works where you basically set up a collection and then click Publish and it automagically goes directly to SM. It takes a little work upfront to get the gallery defaults set, but once you have that it is super easy....I just got behind in never finishing the edits from our vacation last week and then never cleared out that one month's folder to publish. I hope to get them all over to SM in the next couple of weeks now that my kids are done with school.

I'm using Amazon S3 + CloudFront so it's literally static content servicing with no intelligence behind it. It's all glued together with a static content generator so it's a little more complex than publish directly. I have to do some legwork.

I tend to post to social media (Instagram) and keep the web site technical and professional which is the purpose of it really. The social media postings are mostly on request of people who I tend to hang around with in real life rather than trying to build a high profile presence.

Photos "shared galleries" are for family who are non-technical and can barely open a web page...

 

[mollyc]

you can sync collections in lr classic to lr cloud. that might be something for you to look at so that you can see your desktop photos on your mobile devices.

 

[mollyc]

Sync Lightroom Classic with Lightroom ecosystem

Learn how to set up Lightroom Classic desktop to sync photos with Lightroom ecosystem of apps.

helpx.adobe.com

 

[Danfango]

Thanks will look into that. Hadn’t considered it!