Photos and On1?

[mixel]

This is odd. A relative of mine was a long time Aperture user and loved it but then switched to Photos and has benefitted from some of the nice features (iCloud photo sync particularly) - she mostly takes photos with her iPhone now too..

But she misses Apertures star ratings and multi window/screen side by side previews etc. It’s frustrating how Photos is so close to being ideal but missing so many obvious features.. ugh.

Anyway, I’ve helped her try out a ton of alternatives, she doesn’t want to use Lightroom CC as it’s as feature gimped as Photos is, and tbh I don’t look forward to supporting her in the transition if she goes with LR classic (which they’ll probably discontinue like Apple did Aperture, leaving us back at square one..)

Soooo, so far On1 looks to tick most of the boxes, it looks to do everything she needed from Aperture, but gets support and is affordable.

Is there any way at all to make something like this play nicely in the Apple hardware/software ecosystem though? It can use referenced photos so I guess if she has a decent file browser for her iPad and phone she’ll be able to view the pics if they were organised by folder in iCloud, then use the desktop to do edits etc.. But how to manage imports? Is there a way to automate Photos to export all its new photos to a folder? On1 could automatically scan that folder for changes .. I realise this’d give her two copies of her library but that might not be terrible? One like negatives and the other more working files?

Or does anyone have advice for how to deal with stuff like this? On1 for “projects” maybe? With the full library sat in Photos still?

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

If she’s importing on a Mac (not iPad), then I would skip Photos altogether for that step. I like to import my unprocessed images to a regular directory, and I only drop my developed exports into Photos. In that way, I use Photos as my “always available anywhere” collection.

Also, you can have folders on your iCloud Drive not tied to Photos, so you could still have backups of your originals all the same. Photos just makes sharing with others easier.

 

[MCAsan]

Capture One Pro provides 3 choices for creating and handling libraries. Sessions are project-oriented storage that make sense for studio pro who is doing fashion, product, or portrait work. Managed catalog is like Aperture where you import the images into the C1P library. As I remember there is a migration tool for moving from Aperture. That third choice is a Referenced catalog where images are into folders and subfolders in the file system and the library keeps track of which image is stored where. C1P does layers, luma and color range masking....etc.

The cost of C1P might be a problem. But better to look and know for sure. If the person is using Sony or Fuji cameras, there are special lower cost versions for them.

 

[SkiHound2]

This is odd. A relative of mine was a long time Aperture user and loved it but then switched to Photos and has benefitted from some of the nice features (iCloud photo sync particularly) - she mostly takes photos with her iPhone now too..

But she misses Apertures star ratings and multi window/screen side by side previews etc. It’s frustrating how Photos is so close to being ideal but missing so many obvious features.. ugh.

Anyway, I’ve helped her try out a ton of alternatives, she doesn’t want to use Lightroom CC as it’s as feature gimped as Photos is, and tbh I don’t look forward to supporting her in the transition if she goes with LR classic (which they’ll probably discontinue like Apple did Aperture, leaving us back at square one..)

Soooo, so far On1 looks to tick most of the boxes, it looks to do everything she needed from Aperture, but gets support and is affordable.

Is there any way at all to make something like this play nicely in the Apple hardware/software ecosystem though? It can use referenced photos so I guess if she has a decent file browser for her iPad and phone she’ll be able to view the pics if they were organised by folder in iCloud, then use the desktop to do edits etc.. But how to manage imports? Is there a way to automate Photos to export all its new photos to a folder? On1 could automatically scan that folder for changes .. I realise this’d give her two copies of her library but that might not be terrible? One like negatives and the other more working files?

Or does anyone have advice for how to deal with stuff like this? On1 for “projects” maybe? With the full library sat in Photos still?

Perhaps I just don't know how to use it effectively but I find Photos inadequate as an organizational tool. Probably works well for a pure phone photographer, but not so much for things like culling and rating a relatively large number of imported files. Perhaps there are tricks of which I'm not aware. Overall, I find the browse module of On1 Raw pretty powerful and flexible. It's not a pure catalog system as is LR. You can edit files on any drive. If you save the On1 sidecar files in the same folder as the images, you can move the folders around using finder and not loose track of the files (do that in LR and all of the links are broken). You can import files to On1, rate them, sort them by rating, etc. You can easily create albums to help with organization. And you can select files and export them directly to Photos. So I use Photos mostly as a tool in which I can keep albums for display on devices other than my iMac. So I edit the files in On1, add selected files to an album, select all, and export to Photos. To this point On1 Raw does not export directly to things like FB, Flickr, etc. At least I don't know how to do it. The editing tools are pretty comprehensive, you can easily do local edits, it has layers, it has very nice resizing algorithms, etc. I think DxO Photolab is a better raw developer, but On1 is a more comprehensive tool for overall workflow (at least for my overall workflow). I've never used Capture One though I've generally read good things about it.

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

With Photos, your best bet is to use Albums fairly heavily, but yes, you can’t rate anything beyond Favorite or regular. Maybe someday Apple will bring a 5 star rating system back around.

 

[mixel]

Thanks for all your replies, all really helpful. I've been working through it with her and after playing in On1 for a while she's really impressed. We think she'll go with keeping her full 50k photo library in Photos, because she wants her "junk photos" separate from the "projects" - and it all happens automatically with her other devices then.

The workflow seems pretty good - in Photos you can select a batch and export originals with "Moment name" as folder names, and just keep dumping those projects out to a 'Catalogued folder" and use that like a root folder for On1 full of projects.

If she’s importing on a Mac (not iPad), then I would skip Photos altogether for that step. I like to import my unprocessed images to a regular directory, and I only drop my developed exports into Photos. In that way, I use Photos as my “always available anywhere” collection.

Also, you can have folders on your iCloud Drive not tied to Photos, so you could still have backups of your originals all the same. Photos just makes sharing with others easier.

We thought about that way around, and for her SLR photos she's importing directly onto the iMac but she's taking more and more iPhone photography recently and pays for the 2TB iCloud photo plan so those just appear automatically in the Photos library, which is so easy I'm reluctant to make it fiddlier for her. When she goes on holidays etc she has no laptop, but the photos appear automatically on iPad, so she'll have the "negatives" .. Not sure yet whether she'll export the "finished" projects back to Photos from On1.. That starts to get a bit silly, but it might be necessary to then share with Facebook etc easily. Uh oh.

Capture One Pro provides 3 choices for creating and handling libraries. Sessions are project-oriented storage that make sense for studio pro who is doing fashion, product, or portrait work. Managed catalog is like Aperture where you import the images into the C1P library. As I remember there is a migration tool for moving from Aperture. That third choice is a Referenced catalog where images are into folders and subfolders in the file system and the library keeps track of which image is stored where. C1P does layers, luma and color range masking....etc.

The cost of C1P might be a problem. But better to look and know for sure. If the person is using Sony or Fuji cameras, there are special lower cost versions for them.

Tinkered with the C1P trial and it does seem great, and a bit more mature than On1 - and it makes the RAWs look slightly different. (Weirdly things like sky and sea have a different colour cast for me.. I think I like it but I can't tell which is more colour accurate?) It’s mostly cost that’s the issue though. I’d probably prefer C1P if it was for me, but she’s finding On1 super intuitive so far as it’s so similar to Aperture. Sadly she’s using a Pentax SLR usually so she doesn’t get a cheaper version of C1P.

Perhaps I just don't know how to use it effectively but I find Photos inadequate as an organizational tool. Probably works well for a pure phone photographer, but not so much for things like culling and rating a relatively large number of imported files.

This is exactly the problem she has. She has a iMac set up with a second monitor and really needs to be able to compare images side by side but Apple (and apparently Adobe with CC, AND Corel) haven't added multi monitor support to their DAMs.

You can import files to On1, rate them, sort them by rating, etc. You can easily create albums to help with organization. And you can select files and export them directly to Photos. So I use Photos mostly as a tool in which I can keep albums for display on devices other than my iMac. So I edit the files in On1, add selected files to an album, select all, and export to Photos.

That whole workflow makes so much sense its almost a shame she's entrenched in the recent Apple way of doing things while also using the SLR. If she just took SLR photos, didn't have the iPad and iPhone and wasn't used to iCloud Photo Library syncing she could do everything in On1 and things would be much simpler.

Thanks again, we'll keep experimenting, but it's looking good so far with On1, I'll be figuring out some workflows for a while though it seems!

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

We thought about that way around, and for her SLR photos she's importing directly onto the iMac but she's taking more and more iPhone photography recently and pays for the 2TB iCloud photo plan so those just appear automatically in the Photos library, which is so easy I'm reluctant to make it fiddlier for her. When she goes on holidays etc she has no laptop, but the photos appear automatically on iPad, so she'll have the "negatives" .. Not sure yet whether she'll export the "finished" projects back to Photos from On1.. That starts to get a bit silly, but it might be necessary to then share with Facebook etc easily. Uh oh.

I suppose as long as she doesn’t want to do a bunch of edits to her negatives (Photos is non-destructive), she can always just share straight from Photos, as it will convert the shared version of that file from RAW to jpeg during that process. It just won’t be as complete, but yes, having a place to dump a backup of your RAW files is nice while on a trip.