Reply To: beach ball when attempting to view Photos library


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#126596
mikhail
Participant

Thanks for the feedback. So, the long story on this is that I was an Aperture user for many, many years, and have accumulated a large library (over 70K photos/videos). Initially, it was fully managed (in Aperture), but after some time I simply ran out of space, and ended up converting the entire library from fully managed to fully referenced. I kept using Aperture for a few years after Apple discontinued it. One day the display on my Mac died, and I had to finally do something.

I ended up converting my Aperture library to Photos library using a second Mac and connecting to the one with the failed display remotely. The Photos library _never_ worked right, for all the well-known reasons/issues with the referenced files (I even filed one specific bug with Apple, with no response from them). I waited a year hoping the next release of Mac OS might fix some of the well-known issues that people have discussed in Apple support forums at length. Now, almost 2 years later, not a single issue with Photos that’s been preventing me from moving forward has been fixed. In the meantime, my ever growing collection of photos is sitting unprocessed, and I really need to find a path forward.

I’ve been monitoring RAW Power for quite some time, really hoping that I could just keep my existing Photos library with all the referenced photos/videos and use RAW Power as the UI front-end for it, and do all my work in RAW Power.

Not sure converting my entire library from referenced to managed is a viable solution, primarily due to current as well as future space requirements, plus the path for that conversion seems unclear as well as really tedious. Putting all the new photos into a brand new library is an option, I suppose, but I was _really_ hoping to have my entire photo collection in one single place…

I did look (many times) at the various other alternative software solutions for photo editing/organization, but none seem to just give me what Aperture offered… RAW Power seems to be the closest in that regard, I just hope I can somehow figure out how to use it with my existing referenced Photos library, so that: 1) I can keep all my photos/videos in one place, 2) I can continue using external USB drive to store all the originals, and 3) I can use an app that works, which is presumably RAW Power (which could have been Apple Photos if that app actually worked).

Other thoughts/suggestions?

Thanks,

–mikhail