Just a quick question about catalogue management with Mac... Just getting into the photography/photo editing game and am a bit confused about how catalogues and photo library management works.
From what I can tell, Photos creates its own libraries on import from various devices. Is it true that I cannot access these photos with third-party software such as LR/C1?
For example, I import iPhone photos onto my MBP through Photos. If I want to then organize and/or edit these photos using LR or C1 I have to then export out of the Photos library into another folder on my HDD then import into the LR/C1 catalogue from there? Isn't that excessive and/or a waste of space by duplicating images in both the Photos library as well as on the HDD in another folder?
I have a feeling I am going about this entirely incorrectly.. please feel free to educate me on the best way to go about photo management
Welcome to the debate...you thought once you bought a camera the controversy was over, but now it's the Post Processor Wars.
Actually, that's just a way to say "many choices for the consumer."
You've bopped up against what many see as a problem in Photos. Image managers like it, C1P, Lightroom, etc are parametric image editors, and store the instructions for making adjustments to images in a database. So they have catalogs/libraries for that database and sometimes other files like previews and such.
Photos is a bit different, in that it can also actually store the original images in that library as well. That's called a "managed" library, and it's what Photos does by default unless you turn off the "copy into" option in its prefs. So images get put inside the library, which is really just a glorified folder called a "package." Use control-click and you can "open package" and see what's inside. But yeah, that means a lot of other applications can't access those originals. Only stuff that works closely with Photos and the OS media manager can.
But Photos has another option: referencing images. That's what Lr and some other applications do—they store "references" or basically the relative path to the images, which just sit out in the Finder folders wherever you put them. That makes them more accessible if say you wanna upload one here. In Photos you get there by unchecking the "copy into" option.
But there's a problem with that, cuz then you won't be able to sync those images (or maybe even any images) with your iPhone via iCloud. Also, note that Lr and C1P also store the adjustments in the database, so with all three applications the original isn't changed, so accessing it in its folder doesn't reflect adjustments, crops, etc that you've done. Lr can, however, write metadata to the image file that other apps can access (keywords, captions, location, etc) and in some cases also Lr adjustments, which then say Photoshop could see and accept.
So many of us have different strategies to deal with that. I use Lr to organize most everything, and Photos only for really two purposes: JPEGs I've exported from Lr, which I put into Photos as sort of a gallery front end. And then miscellaneous random shots that I take on my iPhone that I'm unlikely to use anywhere else. If I do find I wanna use one of those, I copy it out of the iPhone separately (often with Image Capture) and then import into Lr. Also, I use Lr Mobile for all my more serious shots on the iPhone, since unlike Photos it can do RAW on the iPhone and send it to Lr on my macOS machine.
You could also have a separate Photos library (not what Apple calls the system library) and use it to reference images, and also reference those same images with say Lr or C1P. Each would only really see the original. It can work, as long as your workflow doesn't confuse things even more. And as long as you aren't using iCloud Photo Library with those.
