Hi Guy,
thanks a lot for sharing your thoughts. I think it is always good to think workflow over and then validate what you are doing or modify the approach. I agree that the lack of renaming functionality in Photos is a gap, but I can see where it is coming from: On iOS devices, one doesn’t want to mess around with it, and in iCould, people shouldn’t need to worry about file names. Then, when you archive raws and edited images to some archive on your Mac, on a NAS or even another cloud service, you would rename during export. I think Apple should then allow users to change the title of images in Photos for iOS, as I normally use the title for naming files while exporting images. Even in Photos for Mac OS adding titles to images is a very cumbersome, manual, one by one process, unless you use Apple scripts which I do and which work really well.
My approach obviously has a gap: All editing done using RAW Power within the iCloud Photos Library is residing only there, except when I use Fuji X-Raw Studio to create the first in-camera iterations of jpgs from raws. But in all honesty, if one switches from one raw processor and image editor to another, I guess in most cases that new setup wouldn’t be able to consume the editing metadata from the previous application(s) anyhow. So if I ever were to change, I would still have the raws and the final JPGs, not only in the iCloud Photos Library, but also in my archive where for each event I have two sub-folders: “Original” for the raws and “Modified” for the final jpgs. So if that change ever happened, I could still selectively redevelop some of the raws into whatever jpg or TIFF I want to create out of them.
But I have no plans changing my workflow for now. I hope Apple Photos and RAW Power will continue to exist for the years to come and will only get better.
Cheers,
Erik