Sometimes I get the question what app I use to edit and manage my photos and what I recommend … an almost hopeless question to answer. Or at least answer quickly. But I’ll make an attempt and describe what I use together with a very short motivation, hopefully I’ll get the time to write a few longer posts that better describe why I’m currently using Lightroom and Photos (macOS).
Yep, the answer is Lightroom Classic and Photos and the main reason I use them is convenience. The major reasons why I use Lightroom are
I started to use Lightroom when Apple declared that they were stopping the development of Aperture. That move was rather painful despite not having that many photos and I don’t really want to spend the time moving to another app right now.
Lightroom can do most of the things I want to do. It might not be the best or have best user experience but it can do it.
Lightroom has a decent iOS app that make it fairly painless to work on my iPad. And I do enjoy editing photos on my iPad.
The DAM (digital assets management) feature of Lightroom Classic is adequate, it’s better than the other programs I’ve tried but not as great as remember Aperture.
The ability to directly upload and synchronize my photos with Smugmug
The reasons I use Photos are
I’m all in the Apple eco-system which makes it really convenient and get access to them everywhere.
Photos just keep getting better, the editing capabilities are becoming really good and the integration with external apps are also good.
I mainly use Photos as a first destination for my iPhone shots but also for keeping a copy of some photos from my bigger cameras.
Photos have these automatic stuff that I think is fun to have, things like automatic album generation etc.
But I should add that I’m highly skeptical of the future of Adobe Classic and have several things I dislike about how Lightroom works (some later post). I also think that Photos severely lacks organization functionality or perhaps more correctly: it doesn’t really have the organizational functionality that I would like to have.