I’m not happy having to maintain two catalogues and in effect two photo libraries by using Lightroom to edit my photos. I’d rather have one library shared by every photo editor I use.
I’ve been using Photos (since Aperture), Lightroom Mobile (and occasionally Lightroom on my iMac) for more than half a dozen years. I’ve extensively used both Photomator and Nitro (including Raw Power (before Nitro)).
Thoughts between the two, and possibly thoughts on other editing software such as Darkroom and Acorn?
I want editing capabilities beyond Photos, and a single Library used by Photos and whatever my final choice is.
You can use Edit With in Photos to use your editor of choice directly on the image in the Photos Library.
Apple just bought Pixelmator and Photomator so if you don’t mind waiting a year or so for them to do something like integrating Photomator and Photos, that might work. . . .
Mylio is a full photo management system that has greatly matured over the past few years (it’s now 11 years old). It integrates directly with Photos but also offers a variety of ways to add other folders. Its editing tools are roughly similar to Photos but you can also use other photo editors within it. Its big selling points are that it runs on Windows, macOS, Android and iOS/iPadOS platforms; synchronizes on your local network (or global if you want); and strongly encourages you to have multiple backups. It’s industrial strength—there are pros that use it to manage hundreds of thousands of photos.
I use Mylio/Photos for daily photo fun and Capture One for my serious work. I keep the two distinct (but sometimes have to move the fun ones over to the serious ones because they were too good. ) Yes, it’s occasionally tiresome that all the images aren’t in one place but I’ve found over years that it’s not really a problem. Yes, I could add references to the Capture One images to Mylio but you know? Sometimes I just want to find the photo of my nephew being silly without having to wade through swaths of “art.”
I use Affinity Photo, which as @Dafuki mentions above, can be accessed directly in Photos from the Edit With option. Something many like about Affinity, the company, is its software is sold with a non-expiring license, not by annual subscription.
Hm… I’ve had a similar wish and have followed the ‘referenced’ model I learned about in Aperture (which I still use on a Sierra Mac), maybe broad view of my workflow will help.
I import photos to the Mac, rename them with a standard naming convention and save them in folders by Year > Topic > (subtopic when needed). This way the images are still findable/understandable without a ‘catalog’ or ‘library’ app.
Then I import them as referenced into Aperture for creation of books, finding images visually etc.
I’ve found Aperture’s tools pretty much all I need so when I need to edit a photo I do it there, or if I need to do something fancier I might try Graphic Converter, old Pixelmator and so on. These one-offs I can save into the same folder structure of originals or elsewhere.
On a new Mac I’m using the same workflow but Aperture doesn’t run on it so have been fooling around with Photos and a couple of times Acorn and have been considering if Nitro fits my needs but not decided yet. Also I got recently a used Fujifilm camera whose raw files don’t open on Sierra/Aperture.
Hope that workflow helps and looking forward to your solution as I need one too for the new Mac and future! Hoping for something like Aperture’s organization and editing tools referenced to originals in a folder structure with a couple other features like text layers and so on.
Nitro is nice because it can use the Photos library and also file system based organization which is what I use. I don’t need to library organization functions - for my use I can use folders to organize my images (which are mostly not iPhone images which go into the library by default).
Though I have a more extensive photo library than just Photos, I am using Peakto for a DAM library. Good support, updated and using AI in appropriate ways. a little quirky to use with On1, but I like their approach and vision.
I agree that I miss Aperture and I know Photos is trying, but they tend to make things too easy and with limited options.
I was once a daily user of Lightroom, but I got annoyed with the subscription and swapped to using Photos along with Affinity Photo and the Nik Collection. Eventually the ease of use of those LR local brushes drew me back. Until I moved house and lost my darkroom, I was exposing one or two films a day, developing and scanning them. Particularly with large format portraits the ability to spot and touch up areas in LR is marvelous.
I think this is the simplest advice that satisfies my needs. I’ve rarely used “Edit with” in the past, and have been trying it with Nitro and with Photomator over that last weeks. Both work, but I’ve not decided on which I’ll stick with. Photomator seems more ‘robust’, while Nitro seems ‘deeper’. I realize I can continue to use both apps because I’m not limited to only one ‘helper’ app.
I’ll keep you posted — and I’m always open to more input. (I"m an amateur botanist / naturalist, and a major use of my photography is to record in a somewhat journalistic manner the living things I observe and report as an amateur ‘citizen scientist’. Clearly showing critical identification characteristics is important to me.)
Thanks!
Mark (reporting a backyard with 100+ cm of snow having fallen over that last several days :)
There is another option which I am currently using. Nitro and RAW Power, both by Nik Bhatt. Both apps can use Apple Photos Library and any other folders you may wish to use. So I have an SD card that holds all of my non-iPhone photos. I can use this SD card on either of my Mac devices AND on my iPad mini.I could use it on my iPhone, but don’t. There are versions for iPads and iPhones. So, my iPhone photos stay synced via Photos. My other photos stay synced because the SD card is the source for my other photos taken with different cameras. If I move from one device to another, the app figures this out. I really don’t have to use iPhotos if I don’t want to. Because I like to mess with sticking things together from several photos, I then use Acorn, as it will do Layers and other tricks that Nitro and RAW Power do not. I plan in giving this system a good test in the next few weeks.
I have used Raw Power and Nitro for several years. Nitro has a very nice “Edit With” option that sends images to another editing app. I find that useful for specialized image processors such as DxO Pure Raw (noise reduction) or Topaz Photo AI (sharpening, upscaling). I import the images to Nitro, send them to the other apps for processing and then return them to Nitro if I want to do additional editing. The only complication is you have to return the images as DNG (or TIFF) files if you want to preserve all the image data. That works fine but these DNG files are very large even with compression turned on.
Interesting choice use both RAW Power as well as Nitro! I still keep RAW Power close at hand, really just as a way of directly importing an image into Photos.
For actual editing, and for some cataloguing, I either use Nitro, or Photometer, directly, or through “Edit with” and Photos.
Well, I have reluctantly added Pixelmator Pro back, the selection tools are pretty decent. I need these because I like to composite photos into glorious messes! I will await how support goes for Pixelmator, hope there are a few folks around who can answer dumb questions!
Oh, I don’t edit with Raw Power any more once Nitro became available. Lots of things that you can do in Nitro were impossible in Raw Power because it was built on the older software architecture. But it is still an amazing value and Nik is still supporting it (new camera raw formats, bugs, etc.)
) Yes, it’s occasionally tiresome that all the images aren’t in one place but I’ve found over years that it’s not really a problem. Yes, I could add references to the Capture One images to Mylio but you know? Sometimes I just want to find the photo of my nephew being silly without having to wade through swaths of “art.”