I’m looking to get Adobe Photoshop Lightroom for general photo management. I used to use Aperture on a Macbook, which bit the dust a few months ago and I’ve only just got round to replacing it with a Windows PC.

There are two options for buying Lightroom:
– You buy it outright for ~£104
– You pay a monthly subscription (~£7/mo for the first year, £8.50 after) for “Creative Cloud Photography Plan” which has some extra features, mainly to do with backing-up/sharing online and syncing with mobile devices.

I’m normally inclined to buy things outright rather than get into a contract, but frustratingly, the extra features in subscription are something I was looking for.

My initial plan was to use Lightroom to create a mirror of my library (preferably automatically) in fairly low-res jpeg and sync it to my phone with Carousel.

Has anyone got experience of the Creative Cloud Photography features? Or (long shot) using Carousel or another tool to sync in a more DIY fashion.

Bump for those with nothing better to do on a Friday night 🙂

No experience with creative cloud I’m afraid

But Lightroom is ace.

Renting the software is quite a big deal as if you stop paying you loose the back up

Just uploading every jpeg to Flickr would be free. I imagine you’d want to accounts one for sharing selected shots. One for back up.

I have LR CC. To be honest I don’t use the sync features that much so I’m far from expert but what I remember is that when the online thing came out along with the mobile apps a lot of people welcomed them to use as a very easy way to make portfolios of work quickly on the iPad (etc).

I’m not sure how this would fit into the idea of making a backup as the lr edits are not applied until you save an image. I mean they are just instructions like “increase contrast” until the point you effort a file (jpg or whatever)

Probably this made no sense. Sorry…

Or (long shot) using Carousel or another tool to sync in a more DIY fashion.

This is what I do on linux, so might be adaptable for you. IANAP.

Import RAW/Jpegs from camera into PC library using Shotwell. It is a photo organiser, but has basic editing capacity. I mainly use it to rotate images and set date info, as I shoot/scan a lot of film these days. I use Darktable for anything more involved (both free).

The PC library is in my synced Dropbox folder, so everything is automatically backed up. I used to get by with the free storage, but that doesn’t take long for RAW files to gobble up.

Finally, for sharing pictures/albums, I upload to Picasa. This is usually the stuff I’ve edited, whereas the Dropbox is mainly full of junk I’ll never look at again (but can’t bear to lose!)

No experience of Lightroom CC as i use capture one. To be honest the photomanagement is a bit frustrating in C1.

I just upload my favorites to flickr, not ideal backup..
I also use http://www.freefilesync.org/ to sync my photos to my external removable hdd and also my backup server and some stuff to dropbox. Arguable sync software isnt backup software but works well for me.

Lightroom offer is tempting though but dont want to be tied into it when the prices increase and have invested all my time, effort and photos into their system.

Thanks for your input guys, lots of interesting comments there.

Renting the software is quite a big deal as if you stop paying you loose the back up

Good point, and also this:

Lightroom offer is tempting though but dont want to be tied into it when the prices increase and have invested all my time, effort and photos into their system.

Generally I don’t like being tied into subscriptions. It’s always a gamble with time. Invested time setting up my Aperture system, which is now lost (can import it into Lightroom if I can recover the library from my old hard disk).

Just uploading every jpeg to Flickr would be free. I imagine you’d want to accounts one for sharing selected shots. One for back up.

Good idea, might use that one.

a lot of people welcomed them to use as a very easy way to make portfolios of work quickly on the iPad (etc).

That’s kind of what I want – I’m not a professional photographer, but I like to be able to show a mate a photo on my phone when the need arises, without spending hours hunting for it.

This is what I do on linux, so might be adaptable for you. IANAP.

Import RAW/Jpegs from camera into PC library using Shotwell. It is a photo organiser, but has basic editing capacity. I mainly use it to rotate images and set date info, as I shoot/scan a lot of film these days. I use Darktable for anything more involved (both free).

The PC library is in my synced Dropbox folder, so everything is automatically backed up. I used to get by with the free storage, but that doesn’t take long for RAW files to gobble up.

Been using Shotwell for the last few months. I can’t say I’m very impressed with it, but it’s pretty good for free, and I was using it on a ~8 year old laptop, which may not have helped the general experience (Ubuntu still boots faster on that than my new Windows PC).

I don’t want to sync the whole library with RAW files and non-destructive edits (except for backup purposes, separately), just a lower resolution copy suitable for phone viewing.

I’ve downloaded the Lightroom trial so I’ll have a bash with it.

I’ve got Lightroom 4.4 but prefer Picasa as a photo filing system.

Would like to use LR more as it’s nice for tweeting photos but it’s all a bit too much for my needs to be fair.

I’ve used lightroom for a few years now and am currently on the subscription model (I get it the whole CS cheap via the wife). Its been an acceptable cost to pay I’ve found over the years. I.e. it amounts to not buying cups of coffee from a starbucks over the month type price … or drinking a few beers less here or there.

As for syncing, not really something I do per say, but I do have a reasonable working system that allows me to access to the images on the machine remotely across the internet.

I have a network drive that allows me to log in and access files on the drive over the internet. The network drive is a straight backup copy of the main hdd in the machine and stores all the RAW/JPEG/LR files in the same directory format as they are on the main machine.

My general work flow is to import each batch of original shots into a new folder named along the lines of:

HDD > Pictures > 6D > YYYY MM DD – Description
HDD > Pictures > 1D > YYYY MM DD – Description
HDD > Pictures > 30D > YYYY MM DD – Description

This way, the folders stay in date arrangement and allow me to quickly browse the files outwith photo management software. I’ll also have sub directories of “JPEG ” so that my finished outputs for each batch are stored against the originals.

When this gets backed up to the network drive (daily), then I can then browse to the JPEG folders for each batch and get a view of the images.

The naming format and lightroom working has been such that I’m easily able to transfer the whole picture directory across to new hard drives and simply point lightroom to the new drive, and it’ll match up all the images and adjustments in no time.

Currently have around 50k+ images within the pictures directory, yet don’t find that i’m struggling to find particular images due to the directory names

Also worth trying Windows Photo Gallery. It is free, and I think it is actually pretty good for organising photos. Can do all of the usual tagging and searching etc.
All of the tags are stored within the photo files, so they can be searched in Windows Explorer, or imported into other software.

I might give Picasa a try as well.

I’ve tried a year/month folder-based setup before for storing a gallery on my phone and find that it’s not very useful. If I want to show someone a particular photo, I tend to know that it was e.g. on a biking trip, or in a particularl location, rather than the date. Some sort of tag-based system would be better. Ideally it would be linked to the main PC software and share the tags (hence my interest in Lightroom CC). Does any other photo management software have a companion app that will do this (and store the photos offline)?

There are two good digital photo management softwares that im aware of. Daminion and fotoalbum 7. They come in free and paid versions so check the features you need.

http://daminion.net/
http://www.fototime.com/fotoalbum

I have the subscription version, I haven’t really used the CC features as I haven’t got decent broadband (yet), but in general I like Lightroom. It does take a bit of effort to get the best from it, especially improving workflow speed.

I did a quick test to check if the Lightroom for iPad app worked OK, and it appeared to be fine. I get decent broadband next week, so I will start using the CC features….I’ll report back after I’ve given it a go.

For backups, I backup the raw files locally and export processed medium resolution jpg’s to a cloud based service in case I need to get a quick copy of the processed image. Lightroom has some plugin’s for uploading directly to cloud based services. I only use the FB one, and I find it a bit flaky, but that’s probably more to do with FB changing things than Adobe.

It doesn’t really bother me that I need to keep paying for LR to keep my edits, as I like it and I’m happy to support it’s development. I can understand why some people are unhappy with the subscription model, but if there’s on thing worse than paying a subscription for something, it’s investing time in a product which gets canned (like Aperture) and getting left high and dry.

Personally. i’m not comfortable about converting .raw files into .dng, as that does appear to tie you more into Adobe, but dunno it that’s still the case?

I’ve now tried some of the CC features, and TBH I think they are pretty good. The ability to edit pictures taken on a mobile device then sync the picture including edits with LR using the Mobile App is pretty nice.

The big one for me is the ability to upload decent quality images to the cloud and share them via a link with pretty much zero effort. This is a feature I’ve been after for ages. The albums it creates are nicely presented with a black background and can optionally allow people who view the collection to download the images.

Bit of an update. Installed the Lightroom trial version. Imported some photos from my recent holiday. Not overly impressed with intuitive useability but probably just not used to it yet – there’s clearly masses of functionality and I’m willing to put the time in to learn it and develop my own workflow.

But…
I want to import my Aperture library so I can actually test this out. After a bit of looking around and only finding advice that seemed to refer to old versions. Talking to Adobe support, they told me that I’ll have to buy a subscription if I want to import my Aperture library. What good is that? How am I supposed to try it properly without my photos in there? I’m not going to import all my photos and add metadata, etc. again.

Might try one of the alternatives.