Want to Dump Lightroom But No M10 Raw Support for Apple's Photos App

[Jeff S]

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well I spent hours, ( yes really, hours ), on Adobe's less than transparent website trying to figure out where the hell I could get an update for my Lightroom 6.0 stand alone application which is the one I signed up for for free when I got a M240, but it was all a complete waste of time and energy the net result being that I ended up still with Version 6.0 and a deep loathing for Adobe.

I guess, but I don't know for sure, that I would get LR6 version 6.10.1 if I signed up for the LR yearly/monthly subscription plan but I dislike subscription plans and don't want to join one the effort involved in getting an up-to-date stand-alone plan seems to be designed solely to force you into giving up on it and going the subscription route...........So even though I do like LR I guess I'm at an impasse if I want or need to upgrade for any reason.

 

I have Affinity and like the interface quite a lot, but learning another application when I am quite content with the current one is a real pain and absorbs so much time and evaporating even more brain pixels. Has anyone out there tried Affinity and if so how does it work for you?

Are you sure you don't have the same issue as in my last link for Tony?

 

Jeff

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[Exodies]

Can you expand on your dislike of subscription software. For me it is a good solution - incremental improvements and the cash flow encourages the supplier to keep the ball rolling. And, in the case of Lightroom you get the cloud and Lightroom mobile; which, although not in my daily workflow, is very handy.

[Guest]

Can you expand on your dislike of subscription software. For me it is a good solution - incremental improvements and the cash flow encourages the supplier to keep the ball rolling. And, in the case of Lightroom you get the cloud and Lightroom mobile; which, although not in my daily workflow, is very handy.

 

 

it's probably an irrational dislike on my part..............

[Guest]

Are you sure you don't have the same issue as in my last link for Tony?

 

Jeff

 

Hello Jeff, maybe it's that same issue, frankly after so much time trying to make some sense out of the Adobe website and the extreme difficulty of getting any guidance from them I sort of glazed over and had to walk away. I did try your suggestion offered to Tony, but that ended up in some digital back alley. Why the hell they make it so hard to work through I don't know, but Adobe has always been the same since Jobs put their noses out of joint way back........

I may dive back in tomorrow, but for now and for sanity's sake I'm leaving it be.........Thanks for asking anyway!

[calshot]

I also had problem finding a stand alone purchase to upgrade from 4 to 6. I the end I posted  on the Lightroom Queen site and received an answer very quickly. It can be done £67.00 I think in the UK.

I have not yet upgraded since Lightroom 4 is ok for my LC1

 

Rob

[Doug A]

...

 

I have Affinity and like the interface quite a lot, but learning another application when I am quite content with the current one is a real pain and absorbs so much time and evaporating even more brain pixels. Has anyone out there tried Affinity and if so how does it work for you?

 

I switched from Lightroom/Photoshop CC to Affinity Photo last year. It is working very well for me. I use Affinity stand alone for my B&W scans and I use it as a Photos plug-in for my wife's iPhone photos. In both applications I can do everything I previously did with Lightroom and Photoshop just as well, or better, with Affinity - with one big exception.

 

Lightroom is really a DAM with very good image processing and print formatting capabilities. Affinity Photo has no DAM capability and only very basic printing support. It's very much like Photoshop in that respect.

 

My current software lineup for B&W film is Iridient X-Transformer*, Affinity Photo, MakePDF AppleScript** and Print-Tool***.

 

* I use Iridient X-Transformer because I "scan" my negatives with a Fuji X-T20 and Iridient is the best RAW to DNG developer I have found for the X-Trans files.

** I wrote an AppleScript file using the built-in MakePDF macro to make "contact sheets" of complete rolls of scans.

*** Print-Tool is a printing application from the QTR (QuadToneRIP) developers.

[Jeff S]

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Hello Jeff, maybe it's that same issue, frankly after so much time trying to make some sense out of the Adobe website and the extreme difficulty of getting any guidance from them I sort of glazed over and had to walk away. I did try your suggestion offered to Tony, but that ended up in some digital back alley. Why the hell they make it so hard to work through I don't know, but Adobe has always been the same since Jobs put their noses out of joint way back........

I may dive back in tomorrow, but for now and for sanity's sake I'm leaving it be.........Thanks for asking anyway!

One option is to call Adobe customer service and have them walk you through it.... if you can get though the phone maze.

 

Jeff

[wlaidlaw]

Doug, 

 

I beg to differ on the printing ability on Photoshop PS CS. It has an excellent print configuration utility, which can be used at various levels. You can drill down to get very accurate control of colour, if you use PS to control the printer or you can just use  the thousands of different ICC files, which the paper manufacturers have put together with the printer makers. Admittedly if you stick with the almost photographers' standard of the Epson Stylus Photo Pro printers (3880, 4900, 7900 etc) or the newer Sure-Color (P600/800/5000/6000/7000) printers, you will have a wider choice of profiles than for other makes/models of printer. I have the Epson Pro Print Ripper software but prefer to use PS' own print engine for at least up to A2 size. Above that size, the Epson Rip engine is better for 24MP/143MB TIFF images from the SL, as its up-rezzing interpolation is smoother. Even for 10MB images from my old M8, I have printed up to 24" x 36", using the Epson Rip Engine, with excellent results, on my neighbour's Epson 7880 printer. 

 

Wilson

[ramarren]

I'm sure this is heresy for many on this forum but I am a former Aperture user who much prefers Photos to Lightroom. But six months after the M10's release there is still no RAW support which seems an unusually long delay for Apple.

 

I find I rarely do much beyond exposure adjustment, occasional color balance and the inevitable cropping required with a rangefinder for which Photos is fine and it is getting lots of attention from Apple including significant enhancement in the next OS X release. Not to mention it's tight integration with the Apple ecosystem.

 

Meanwhile Lightroom CC doesn't seem to have been touched in years. A colleague who is an Adobe Creative Suite/Cloud power user thinks that Adobe isn't bothering since it feels it has a monopoly in Lightroom, unlike most of its other components all of which are regularly upgraded. There isn't even any personalized support for Lightroom unlike the other CC components.

 

I find it hard and complex to use and haven't yet found a way to move the default file locations to my iCloud directory to ensure realtime backup and my power user colleague couldn't either.

 

Am I alone in my frustration?

 

?? I've seen Lightroom updates three times this year already.

 

I don't know what you mean by "personalized support" ...? I have Lightroom heavily personalized with my dedicated defaults for each of my cameras, hundreds of import, image processing, printing, metadata annotation, slide show, and web template presets that I use for all my work.

 

Your and your colleague's inability to 'move the default file locations' (there aren't any, really) just means you don't understand how to use Lightroom. Lightroom does everything with original files by reference ... put the photos where you want them to be, they stay there. Put the catalog anywhere on a directly accessible volume (no network volumes). Export your finished photos to whereever you want them to go. Period, that's it.

 

Perhaps you should try taking one of the many excellent training courses on Lightroom before passing judgement.

[ramarren]

AND, btw, I downloaded three Leica M10 DNG files from http://www.photographyblog.com/previews/leica_m10_photos/ (since I don't own an M10 myself). 

 

I dropped them onto Photos in macOS Sierra v10.12.5. They opened right up and show excellent skin tones, renderings as good as the matching JPEGs on the same site. So I don't know what you're talking about with respect to "no RAW support" for the Leica M10. ???

[pnoble]

AND, btw, I downloaded three Leica M10 DNG files from http://www.photographyblog.com/previews/leica_m10_photos/ (since I don't own an M10 myself). 

 

I dropped them onto Photos in macOS Sierra v10.12.5. They opened right up and show excellent skin tones, renderings as good as the matching JPEGs on the same site. So I don't know what you're talking about with respect to "no RAW support" for the Leica M10. ???

 

You are absolutely right, Ramarren. I just confirmed by importing a DNG from LR and making the comparison. Thank you!

 

I was dutifully waiting for Apple to announce RAW compatibility and had read a comment somewhere that there was an issue importing M10 DNG files into Photos so I didn't even try. The M10 is still not listed: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207049

 

All's well that ends well and it seems that my post has spawned other useful conversations regarding LR!

[Doug A]

Wilson,

 

You are right. I edited my note too quickly. I meant the comparison of Affinity to Photoshop to apply only to the DAM function. Apologies.

 

Back in my Lightroom/Photoshop days I briefly played with Photoshop's print support as a possible replacement for Print-Tool. (I was considering giving up on QuadTone RIP. But then a friend helped me straighten out my problems with QTR and I went back to Print-Tool.)

 

[ramarren]

You are absolutely right, Ramarren. I just confirmed by importing a DNG from LR and making the comparison. Thank you!

 

I was dutifully waiting for Apple to announce RAW compatibility and had read a comment somewhere that there was an issue importing M10 DNG files into Photos so I didn't even try. The M10 is still not listed: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207049

 

All's well that ends well and it seems that my post has spawned other useful conversations regarding LR!

They don't even have the typ 262 cameras listed, and I've been dropping M-D files into Photos for a year. I'll have to send my friends at Apple a funny note.

[mikemgb]

?? I've seen Lightroom updates three times this year already.

 

I don't know what you mean by "personalized support" ...? I have Lightroom heavily personalized with my dedicated defaults for each of my cameras, hundreds of import, image processing, printing, metadata annotation, slide show, and web template presets that I use for all my work.

 

Your and your colleague's inability to 'move the default file locations' (there aren't any, really) just means you don't understand how to use Lightroom. Lightroom does everything with original files by reference ... put the photos where you want them to be, they stay there. Put the catalog anywhere on a directly accessible volume (no network volumes). Export your finished photos to whereever you want them to go. Period, that's it.

 

Perhaps you should try taking one of the many excellent training courses on Lightroom before passing judgement.

 

I believe that what the OP wanted was the ability to add his iCloud Photos to Lightroom and use that as the default storage for his photographs. This seems to be impossible, Apple provides an app to access your photos, conveniently called "Photos", but it is an app, Apple do not allow you to treat your iCloud photo storage as a folder, this makes it impossible to add it to Lightroom.

 

I use Lightroom CC, I would also love to add iCloud Photos to my Lightroom folders, it can't be done.

[ramarren]

I believe that what the OP wanted was the ability to add his iCloud Photos to Lightroom and use that as the default storage for his photographs. This seems to be impossible, Apple provides an app to access your photos, conveniently called "Photos", but it is an app, Apple do not allow you to treat your iCloud photo storage as a folder, this makes it impossible to add it to Lightroom.

 

I use Lightroom CC, I would also love to add iCloud Photos to my Lightroom folders, it can't be done.

 

 

If that's what was meant, it would have been much easier to understand the way you put it. 

 

I've not yet been able to figure out how to use the iCloud Photo Library or iCloud Photo Stream at all (whether with Photos or anything else), none of the options make any sense to me. So I keep it turned off. Someday, perhaps, I'll take an hour or three to study it and figure out whether it's at all useful. These things seem targeted primarily for iPhone and iPad picture taking ... I do plenty of that, but they're not my photographic tools. I see them as a "recording device in my pocket" for snapping photos of things I need to remember or illustrate quickly. My photography is done with 'real' cameras.

 

You can easily create a folder on your iCloud drive into which you can store your original image library to access with Lightroom ... presuming you've bought enough iCloud storage space. My Lightroom original image library is several terabytes in size ... I can't see any useful way to manage that through a variable speed network interface nor would I want to pay for the amount of iCloud storage necessary. It could be used easily for an auxiliary repository accessible while traveling or when away from your main image processing system, and you could periodically move the files to local storage easily. Of course, that would not be the Photos "iCloud Photo Library" or "iCloud Photo Stream", at least as I understand those concepts. 

 

Of course, you can select all your iCloud Photos and export them into a new repository, and then import that into Lightroom. But I suspect you want to have Lightroom seamlessly integrate with the iCloud Photo Library, which is certainly not possible with the current implementation of the iCloud Photo Library since the files are not represented in a standard volume-oriented file system. 

[mikemgb]

If that's what was meant, it would have been much easier to understand the way you put it. 

 

I've not yet been able to figure out how to use the iCloud Photo Library or iCloud Photo Stream at all (whether with Photos or anything else), none of the options make any sense to me. So I keep it turned off. Someday, perhaps, I'll take an hour or three to study it and figure out whether it's at all useful. These things seem targeted primarily for iPhone and iPad picture taking ... I do plenty of that, but they're not my photographic tools. I see them as a "recording device in my pocket" for snapping photos of things I need to remember or illustrate quickly. My photography is done with 'real' cameras.

 

You can easily create a folder on your iCloud drive into which you can store your original image library to access with Lightroom ... presuming you've bought enough iCloud storage space. My Lightroom original image library is several terabytes in size ... I can't see any useful way to manage that through a variable speed network interface nor would I want to pay for the amount of iCloud storage necessary. It could be used easily for an auxiliary repository accessible while traveling or when away from your main image processing system, and you could periodically move the files to local storage easily. Of course, that would not be the Photos "iCloud Photo Library" or "iCloud Photo Stream", at least as I understand those concepts. 

 

Of course, you can select all your iCloud Photos and export them into a new repository, and then import that into Lightroom. But I suspect you want to have Lightroom seamlessly integrate with the iCloud Photo Library, which is certainly not possible with the current implementation of the iCloud Photo Library since the files are not represented in a standard volume-oriented file system. 

 

How do you create a folder in iCloud you can access with Lightroom?

[ramarren]

How do you create a folder in iCloud you can access with Lightroom?

 

 

• In the Finder, open the iCloud Drive
• Use File > New Folder to create a folder and name it what you want (I named my test example LR_Folder)
• For purposes of the test, I copied about 20 random JPEGs into it from a folder on my main drive. 
• I added it to Lightroom by opening Lightroom, selecting the contents of the folder in the Finder, and dropping the folder onto the Lightroom window in Library mode, selected Add mode, and clicked "Import". 

 

The actual folder location on your local hard disk is revealed by iteratively selecting the folder and its parents and selecting "Show Parent Folder" ... On my system, the test folder is located at the file path ~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/LR_Folder

 

You'll hardly ever need to know precisely where in the file system it is, though. You access its contents through LR, or through iCloud Drive and the Finder. 

[Exodies]

I access my iPad and iphone photos in Lightroom by using LR Mobile. Either auto import from camera roll or selectively import the pics to LR on your mobile device and then from LR desktop you can find them near the top of the catalogue panel in "All Synced Photographs".

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[wlaidlaw]

I would totally agree with Godfrey's comment that iCloud photo storage seems to be designed for iOS device use. I use it for the few photos I have taken with my iPhones and iPads and it seems to work well for this. I had a look at it for storage/back of my main image library which is around 1.2 Terabytes and it would have been very expensive to do this. Also at the moment my upload speeds (1mbit/sec in France and 7mbit/sec in the UK) are just too slow for this to be practical. I also don't like the newer Photos app and still use the older iPhotos, whose image organisation structure seems more logical and convenient than the later app for my JPEG library. I use Capture One Sessions to store and organise my DNG's. I bought a 2TB SSD for my Mac Mini and a 4TB SSD external back up drive and keep all my photos there.

 

They also do a further backs up to an Apple Time Capsule drive, although I am looking for a better solution to this. I had a problem with the RAID network drive at my UK house, where the controller/housing died. The maker could not or would not repair it. I bought a new NAS drive unit from a different maker but it could not read the 4 x 1TB RAID 5 striped hard drives out of the old unit. The original maker said they could read the drives for me and copy them to a new 2TB drive (not RAID striped) at a cost of $200/per original RAID drive. I declined and regenerated the data from the original sources. So it would seem that RAID 5 works well if one of the original rotating drives dies but not if the housing or controller dies. 

 

Wilson

[Exodies]

Exactly. You need effective backup. All raid 5 will do is speed up recovery from single spindle failures and as it adds hardware and complexity it will increase the frequency of other failures. To be used only if you can't afford the downtime to restore a disc (which is the most frequent fault) - in my opinion this means exclusively servers; not desktops.