How do you deal with your photos?

[moominmolly]

I dislike iPhoto kind of a lot, which makes me curious what different people use to manage/browse/tag/sort/keep their photos. I'm currently using F-Spot Photo Manager (on Linux); what do you use, and on what platform? Lightroom? iPhoto? Aperture? Something else? I personally commonly need to sort photos on Linux, Windows, AND MacOS, depending on the day, so I'm interested in all answers. :)

Comments

[sol3.livejournal.com]

I'm a huge fan of lightroom - and you can play with Beta 3 for free until April, 2010! I've used it on both windows and OS X, and have heard rumor that it plays nicely under wine on linux.

I find it really fast to go through and cull photos, tag them, do most of my edits (I haven't opened up photoshop in over a year), the editing is non-destructive and you can quickly/easily make virtual copies of things.

Beta 3 adds direct interaction/support for flickr - and there's useful plugins for services like smugmug and facebook (and I can't wait until those get updated for LR's bi-directional support - so that things like comments and such can be sync'd back to you).

Also, unlike iPhoto, Lightroom makes it easy to split your collection. I usually only have the current month's worth of photos on my laptop, the rest are on an external drive - but I have one lightroom library (well, two now - lightroom 2 and the one for lightroom 3) that still has/tracks all the metadata/thumbnails and such so I can still poke through my library even when my drive array is disconnected.

[sol3.livejournal.com]

Er, not "Beta 3" - "Lightroom 3 Beta" :)

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

The split collection thing sounds extremely useful.

[coraline]

lightroom is the way and the, er, Light.
they actually hired honest-to-god UI engineers, and it is way slicker and more intuitive than i expected. and with university discount, it's only $99.

[sol3.livejournal.com]

Not only that, but a number of the core engineers on it were hard core photographers - who started working on this specifically because bridge/photoshop was clunky to work with.

It's also fast - one of the reasons I went with it over aperture early on is because I was working on a lower power machine, and aperture wants beefy. I actually run lightroom on my little msi-wind running snow leopard for doing photo work when wandering around (the wind fits in my smallest camera bags, the laptop, not so much)

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

Whoa, you run it on that thing? OK, you've sold me.

[fengshui.livejournal.com]

No, no! It's "You're braver than I thought!" :)

[srl.livejournal.com]

Does lightroom have support for extending metadata to include custom fields? The $99 student discount makes it sound like something I might go for.

[sol3.livejournal.com]

I haven't played with it - but it looks like people have come up with ways to Create custom metadata sets

[sol3.livejournal.com]

In fact, Lightroom goodies has a great set of lightroom plugins/additions. I don't know whether or not these have been vetted with lightroom 3 yet, but i used the smugmug, facebook, and flickr exporters in lightroom 2 happily.

[fengshui.livejournal.com]

What field are you looking for, specifically?

[srl.livejournal.com]

Arbitrary fields defined by me, as well as XMP fields. I'm a historian who takes pictures of archival materials, and I need robust metadata to keep track of citations and item locations for each image I shoot.

[coraline]

i don't know? i wouldn't be surprised, but i haven't used the keywords feature...

[fengshui.livejournal.com]

I too love lightroom. I have all of my photos on the home server, but I keep the lightroom catalog on the laptop. With this setup, I can see, tag, and reorganize my files all I like when I'm not at home, and it applies the changes when I return. I can also import files into the same catalog but on the local disk when traveling, and then move them into the master directory when I get home.

Add to that virtual copies, non-destructive photo editing, and everything else that LR offers, and it's a no-brainer.

It's also fast.

I resisted using it for a while (preferring Adobe Bridge), but I'm very glad I switched. Since Beta 3 is out for testing, I'd play with that and see what you think. You should be able to get a student copy for $100, and possibly less. Estimated release date for LR3 is early 2010.

[sol3.livejournal.com]

The beta runs till april, 2010 (whether or not that's tied to the LR3 release date remains to be seen).

The other thing that I don't use frequently, but have used often enough to make it worth it, is that lightroom, starting with version 2, allows you to export/import catalogs. This means that if you have a small machine you travel with, and want to do photo editing on the fly with, AND a large machine that you do all your heavy lifting on when you get home, you can export your catalog, on the small machine, and re-import it to the large machine's catalog, getting all your edits and such along with it. It's still clunkier than it could be (i'd love to see adobe take a cue from apple's "home sharing" with itunes on this front) - but really insanely useful.

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

Oh WOW. Okay. I would use that. A lot.

[fengshui.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I have sufficient disk space on my laptop (right now) that I just import photos I take while traveling into my main catalog. Once I get home from my trip, I move the photos (in lightroom) from the laptop disk to the home server.

[jojotbird.livejournal.com]

I use lightroom too... the export/import features are nice... I also use some of the plugins so that I can export selected galleries to Smugmug really easily... that way my extensive catalogs are on my laptop, but I can easily filter out subsets to put online and share with my friends :)