Currently umming and arring between settling on Google or Flickr for my (purely hobby/amateur) photography cloud needs.

Crux for me currently is, which of the built in image processors (Snapseed for Google, Aviary for Flickr) is ‘best’?

Online reviews aren’t much help – I like Snapseed for ease of use and familiarity, but Aviary seems to produce ‘cleaner’ results (although if you see my photos I’m quite a fan of overprocessed, ‘dirty’ images).

I’m at ease with Photoshop and GIMP, but really don’t want to always have to load those up…

Loads of photo geeks here, so any insight into whether Snapseed or Aviary have any kind of edge over the other?

Bump.

#unfiltered FTW 😉

#unfiltered? Not sure want you mean? I mean, I understand the words but it has no meaning for me.

#every***kingfiltericanfind

Anything sRGB is just visual Coldplay.

VSCO do a great iPhone app that lets you go quite deep aswell as just twatting on a filter.

Looks great too (the app) and the quality of the curated photography is top.

That.

Nature puts on a wonderful display. Why cock it up?

if you are taking that approach then why take a photo in the first place.

#memories FTW.

Good point. It’s often a struggle to replicate what you see, regardless of how good your equipment is. But if you want to show other folk what you saw then a photo can help.

#memories FTW.

At my age? I can barely remember my way home some rides 😯

Both Snapseed and VSCOcam are very good imho. Snapseed is my go to sketchbook for rough edits. Since it had a makeover there is now a brush tool with masking, dodge/burn and exposure correction. Fantastic.

Bit of clarification. I trained as a painter and have drifted into photography, so I’m less interested in visual fidelity and pristine photographs and more bothered about interesting (to me at least) images.

Loving how quick ‘n’ dirty the Snapseed HDR filter is…

I like snapseed on my phone and that would tempt me

But I urge you to consider shooting RAW and using Lightroom. That will give you massive editing power. The just use a plug in to send your work to the cloud once your done. It massively than full photoshop and probably faster than Snapseed as it can share edits

Second vote for Lightroom here.

Lightroom is for image processing, photoshop is for image manipulation – although you can do the first in PS, it’s much more intuitive in LR.

This is where I get awkward. Linux user by choice… Seem to remember something called Darktable?

Having said that, don’t currently have a camera that can shoot raw (really don’t have much concern at all for the tech side of photography – has got me into all sorts of arguments with other photography teachers!).

Having said that, don’t currently have a camera that can shoot raw (really don’t have much concern at all for the tech side of photography – has got me into all sorts of arguments with other photography teachers!).

I’m all for ignoring the tech stuff

But for me RAW has made it easier to ignore the tech stuff not harder. Take the picture and you end up with a file that is just easier to process later

This is where I get awkward. Linux user by choice.

GIMP.

GIMP if on Linux

Lr if on Mac

Don’t care about PC.

Happy GIMP user for many years.

For ‘everyday’ photos it’s just a faff to download auto-uploaded images to process in GIMP and then re-upload them.

Flickr/Aviary currently winning, but I do miss the grungey stuff that Snapseed has.

Hmmmnnn.

http://www.darktable.org/about/features/

I’ve used Flickr for years for general online albums, and they’ve got fairly good now in the way they present photos, plus have 1TB of storage, or is it unlimited now?

Not a place to store all your source RAW files though really, but then that’s going to max out bandwidth. That only really applies to high end and SLR camera stuff anyway. I store all my working raw files on OneDrive now as I’ve got a bucket load of storage.

For my SLR, as I’m Nikon I’ve always used their Capture program on the desktop (now Capture NX), as it’s the best RAW converter for Nikon NEF files, powerful and though not a pixel editor it does all the edits I could want for a fraction of the cost of Photoshop. No use to other camera brands though, plus Nikon have effectively scrapped it. They have a replacement but it loses the U-Point stuff which was the entire power of it.

I’ve been using Snapseed on the old Android phone (before it died) and for phone camera adjustments I have to say it really works well. I don’t do the Instagram-a-like faded filter stuff. I just do what I mainly do with desktop editing and bump contrast and minor adjustments basically. Snapseed has a nice preset called Drama which does a lot of what I want, though I back off the amount it does and warm the saturation a little as it goes for a large desaturated look (though that can look nice).

I’m ditching Android though to have a play with Win Phone. Will see what my options are there, though Lumia stuff and Nokia history with their cameras has always been good.

Anyway, desktop I would like something long term when Capture NX won’t work any more that does something like it but has the simplicity of things like Snapseed. It does need to process RAW files properly though from the SLR. As I mention, for Nikon that’s NX really as others tend to lose some of the in-camera settings or process the RAW inconsistently.

Out of interest, Snapseed is made by Nik Software, who created Capture NX. Hence similar control/U-point interface. That’s what’s killed Capture NX though as Google bought Nik and suddenly Nikon dropped NX and replaced it with something else and lost all the features.

GIMP – well it’s free. It’s still bloated and stuck in the 1990s in terms of UI. 1990s sandal wearing Linux UI at that 😉

A simple desktop editor on Windows I like though is Paint.NET. Not that powerful but it’s quick and easy to use.

Thought i’d chip in as theres a few useful linux photography tools that you should check out.

Darktables
lightzone
rawtherape
digikam
gimp

These should cover most things free.

However these days im mostly doing my editing in capture one 8

The reason for this simple, if your camera is a sony that uses raw then you can download capture one express free for use with sony .arw raw files. the upgrade to the capture one pro 8(for Sony) is 50 euro. bargain if you have a sony camera.

Also check out zoner photo studio free for windows and daminion for a decent DAM and fastrawviewer for a fastish decent viewing culling program.

oh and if i have to i use snapseed and flickr

Ooh.

Just been playing with Darktable (known about it for a while but never got round to installing). Pretty cool bit of kit. Even though I can’t do raw right now it plays nice with .jpg, etc. too.

Seems pretty high quality algorhythms and capable of a pleasing amount of grunge if you push it too.

Will entail a bit of a change in workflow but definitely deserves further investigation/playing…

Lightroom FTW. Combined with a decent filter program vsco alien skin etc and you have something that can produce stunning images if you shoot raw.

“I’m ditching Android though to have a play with Win Phone. Will see what my options are there“

Options are quite decent. Try ProShot and CameraPro for camera apps and Pictomaphone, Fhotoroom and Photoshop Express for processing. Though there are stacks more.

I tend to stick with Lumia Camera for the camera app, but that’s only because mine’s a Pureview so I can just shoot and reframe later: the Lumia Camera UI is pretty terrible.

I don’t disagree with the choices/suggestions. GIMP & Darktable are good – if sometimes mildly frustrating (but so are all the choices in my experience!)

But: I am somewhat fascinated though; a juxtaposition if you will; A Linux user by choice, who yet has little concern for photo tech finagling – digi or otherwise – Bravo!

Edit: Maybe a correlation to far – about a mere OS of course!

(finagling: sorry if I just murdered or created a word).

Linux user by contrary choice – switched from Windows years ago just because I liked the idea of Linux (do keep a sneaky dual boot around though, mainly for Garmin hook up). By no means a terminal pounding power user though.

As I don’t have to rely on a camera for my living, I can afford to follow a bit of a Luddite path when it comes to tech and processing. As happy to use a years old camera phone shooting artifact-filled lo-res .jpg as a shiny DSLR shooting massive raw images if I get an interesting picture out at the end.

Think Google have made my choice for me with the new Google Photos. Can still get at the full Snapseed editor through the mobile app, but not through the full website. Bit of a deal breaker.

Time to switch to Flickr and learn Darktable.