Thanks Nik,
I figured this out by finding your prior posts and tweets regarding keyboarding. Unfortunately Apple Photos doesn’t work for me. Let me explain.
I have 25,000 family photos from when my kids were first born. These are a combination of RAW and JPEG files that exist on a 5TB external drive. Over the years I managed most of this via Lightroom and my own folder structures. I have since abandoned LR – so my files are still somewhat maintained in their own folder structure/hierachy that makes sense to me.
In and around all of this, I have created a huge mess of the Photos app – going from iPhoto upgrade to Photos, and some years copying images INTO the library, some years just changing the settings to not copy files (reference files). Truth be told, its a bit of a mess and its my fault. On top of this, I switched to android for 2 years and have a huge mess of random DSLR and Phone photos in Google photos….anyways…
Now my main Photos library also exists on this 5TB external drive. So I have: Photos Library and 25K of personal photos on the same drive. This is backed up via Backblaze. I CANNOT use iCloud Photo Library for ALL my photos unless I consolidate the originals into the library – which means I would have essentially two versions of the same images on the same 5TB drive. This is why I want something like Aperture. Photos is for iCloud Photo Library (cell phone pics) and my pro shot DSLR images would be maintained by me after 13 years of file/folder management.
At the end of the day, I wish Aperture was still alive.
I wish RAW Power let me edit raw like it currently does, but also give me DAM tools so I don’t have to rely on Photos.
Phew, thanks for reading. 😛