Lightroom or Photos? How to decide
I got a question from a friend I thought, after answering, would be of interest to a wider audience, so I’m sharing it here. If you have thoughts about this, I’d love to hear them.
I am still committed to LRC, but enjoyed your discussions about your transition to Lightroom Mobile and it has me rethinking which version of LR is best for my workflow and if LR is even the best answer.
Did you investigate moving to Photos?
Why do you stay in LR vs using Photos?
I had to think about this for a bit.
I use both, for different reasons. Until the last few years, Photos was simply not good enough for “serious” photography, so when I set up my systems, it wasn’t a practical option. When I made the decision to shift from LR Classic to Lightroom, I didn’t really consider shifting to Photos instead.
There are a couple of reasons for that. One is that I’m really comfortable processing images in Lightroom and so the shift to the Mobile platform didn’t require significant changing of my processing workflow. That said, it did require a lot of reinventing the way I organize and manage images (the whole Data Access Management parts), but overall, I think what I’m doing now in LR Mobile is as good, and less complex, than what I did in Lightroom. That part of my workflow was overdue for a reinvention and this gave me the reason.
Image organization and management is at this point the biggest reason I wouldn’t consider shifting all my work to Photos. I don’t think it’s as strong in dealing with metadata. I’ve also always used the separation to keep my “personal” images separate from my “serious” photos, and I could figure that out if I chose to merge them, but I’m happy not feeling like I need to.
Now, Photos keeps getting better. In the upcoming fall release, RAW processing gets even better, and I find that intriguing — I will be testing that in the fall. And last year, Apple bought an app called Photometer, and I’m very curious what Apple intends to do; if they end up releasing it again as an Apple branded app, or if they integrate it’s capabilities into Photos (especially organization and data management stuff) I will be very tempted to consider shifting again to a 100% apple platform for my photography.
Right now, my Lightroom setup has about 7500 images in it. Photos has 7300 plus a few hundred videos. As the cameras on iPhones have gotten better, I’m finding I use it more and more for “serious” images, and I’ve had to figure out what that means — right now, those RAW images get imported into Lightroom Mobile and processed there, and flagged in Photos so I know those images are copies not to be used out of Photos. There are maybe 200 of those at this point.
I’ve always used the Camera app on the phone. Recently I started experimenting with Halide, and I’m starting to get comfortable with it. I expect to use it more in the future, and that might mean even more “serious” iPhone imaging. We’ll see.
I could, happily, I think, live only in Photos. Two years ago that would not have been true. Two years from now? I’m curious what we might see out of Apple, maybe as soon as this fall. It’s still, and definitely, and option.
I would suggest waiting for the fall releases, and then give yourself an assignment: spend a month (or perhaps a few hundred images, depending on how often you take shots) ONLY in Photos, and see how you like it. Breaking habits is hard, but the easiest way to find out if a change like this makes sense is to do it in a controlled way, then evaluate what you think after that time — but it has to be a non-trivial test, not just a couple of images. Live with it, think about it, then make a choice. The first dozen images in the test will probably be frustrating, but that’s normal when reinventing long held habits. At some point, you may simply realize that it’s working and you want to make the shift. But if you continue to not being sure, keep it up until you’ve given it enough time for new habits to start kicking in. A quick decision will heavily bias towards status quo, not to change, so be patient.
Depending on what Apple announces in the next few months, I might well try that as well.
And whatever you end up deciding, always have fun…
