Saturday, March 05, 2016

iCloud Photo Library, Photos.app and my Aperture plan (plus Aperture Exporter)

I recently migrated my daughter to Photos.app and iCloud Photo Library. I ran into some minor issues and one significant bug, but I liked it well enough to pay $1/month for the 50GB tier. It did take hours for her few thousand images to upload. My hope is that she’ll start managing (deleting mostly) her images this way. The full res images are stored in a Photos.app Library in her account on my Air as well as in iCloud; the local Library gets backed up with offsite rotation.

So now I’m trying it for myself. I’ve never liked or used “My Photo Stream”, so I didn’t have to turn that off. I just enabled iCloud Photo Library with an empty Library then added the images from my phone. It’s impressive to see crops and burst select changes made on my phone update my Photos.app Library almost instantly.

Incidentally, turning this feature on disables iTunes photo sync. I didn’t even realize I had 125 orphaned images on my phone from when I used to do iTunes photo sync.

I’m not even dreaming of moving my 350GB Aperture Library to iCloud though. Here’s my current Aperture plan: 

  1. Migrate the family Mac to El Capitan after next release and test my Aperture Library against that machine. I assume it will work well enough but I need to do my own testing. I know of a few problems with El Capitan.
  2. Once I’m somewhat satisfied I’ll move my Mac to El Cap and stay there for two years unless (unlikely) Aperture runs in OSNext. 
  3. Meanwhile I’ll be using Photos.app to work with my iPhone 6 images and perhaps RAW or JPEG images from my dSLR. I’ll “Develop” them there and, when they are “ready”, I’ll move JPEGs (not RAW) into Aperture and delete them from Photos.app on my Mac and my iPhone (replaces importing from iPhone). Yes, this appalls some photographers but I care about archives more than image editing options post initial work. 
  4. Somewhere around 2018 I’ll flatten all my keywords (I use Aperture’s inheritance model queries -- which were too advanced for market really) and migrate to Photos.app 2018. Assuming Photos.app is still around in 2018.

Incidentally, while developing this plan I tried out my copy of Aperture Exporter. It didn’t go well. AE creates keywords in Aperture for things like image-album relationships; in my case that resulted in very large numbers of keywords. Probably more than Aperture was ever tested to handle, more than enough to prove the UI doesn’t handle scrolling. If I use AE on the future it will be with a temporary copy of my Library, not the original.

Note/Update: 

At least with Yosemite this seems to work, though it’s stretching the bounds of what Apple allows:

  • My Photo Stream: turned off in iOS.Photos, OS X.Photos and Aperture. (It’s a useless feature.)
  • iCloud Photo Sharing: turned off in OS X.Photos, on in iOS.Photos and Aperture.
  • iCloud Photo Library: on in iOS.Photos and OS X.Photos, not available in Aperture. Download Originals to this Mac in iOS.Photos, Optimize in iOS.Photos.

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