So how do I keep everything straight when I use so many editors? Like I said, it’s not terribly pretty, especially for someone a little OCD like me. I have three streams into my photo management scheme. One is my DSLR. The other two are me and my wife’s iPhones. As a general rule of thumb, iPhone photos go into Photos for macOS and DSLR shots go into Lightroom. The exception to this is when I edit an iPhone shot in Lightroom Mobile. That photo will go into Lightroom because the mobile app will sync it there.
I really like how Apple is providing options for consolidated family “things” in iCloud. iCloud will automatically set up a shared family album or calendar or other shared app function if you want it to. But what it doesn’t have is a family iCloud Photo Library. My wife and I used to get around this by using a single, joint iCloud account as the “baseline” account on our iPhones. This bugged me since it essentially made it so that our iPhones thought we were the same person. But it did make it easy for our photos to go straight into Aperture. A few years ago I changed over our phones to individual baseline accounts. Now we each have our own iCloud Photo Library. However, Photos for macOS won’t let you have more than one iCloud Photo Library per Mac.
My solution to this problem was DropBox. I turned on the auto-uploader on each of our phones. Every once in a while I will pull all the photos into Photos and then clean our DropBox. Then Live Photos came along. As soon as you pull a Live Photo out of the Apple ecosystem, it becomes a normal jpeg. Gone was DropBox from my import workflow.
Now I upload all of our iPhone photos directly to our iCloud Photos Library. I do this by Air Dropping new photos to our iPad which is set up with that old joint iCloud account. When I’m done, I mark as favorites the photos I want to keep on my phone and delete the rest.
We’re not done yet. That was just the import workflow. There’s an export/sharing side as well. Facebook sharing primarily starts in Lightroom. I’ll do round one there. If I want to add a photo from Photos, I’ll add it to the album I created with the Lightroom upload. Occassionally I’ll upload directly from my iPhone, but that goes into an “On the go” album so I can keep everything straight. Heaven forbid there would be a photo on Facebook that isn’t assigned to an album! I also use Lightroom to upload shots to Flickr. I use my iPhone to go to Instagram. I don’t cross those streams ever. Instagram is for iPhone shots. Flickr is for edited DSLR shots. Oh, and one more Apple gripe: I with I could create a new Facebook album in Photos, but I can’t. It only allows you to upload to albums that already exist.
There are two more avenues for sharing. First is DropBox. I know; I said earlier that I stopped using it. That was just for Importing. I LOVE DropBox for sharing albums. It doesn’t matter what platform you’re on with DropBox. It also allows you to download a whole album at once which iCloud does not. iCloud is the other sharing tool. I use this one almost exclusively for sharing with family or for sharing photos from trips with friends who I know have iOS devices. I especially like to use it for instantly sharing photos of my daughter to a photo stream we’ve had going since before she was born.
There’s one key piece I’ve left out. This is the not-so-efficient thing I do. Except for Facebook sharing, I often will export Lightroom photos and import them into Photos to get them to iCloud for sharing. This and a few other things I do creates lots of duplicates. I’m not too terribly worried about that though since I have so much storage. I keep both my Lightroom and Photos libraries on a Drobo external drive. Storage is so cheap these days, I don’t feel bad about those duplicates.
So there it is. A little flow chart graphic might have helped to explain that I think. Got a good way I can be more efficient? Want to tell me how you manage your library? Leave a comment!
