Sharing edits between Mac and iOS

[Ben Hughes]

I’ve started using a Finder-based workflow which works *almost* seamlessly for syncing between Mac and iOS:
– Use Syncthing to share a folder from my Mac with my iPad (depending on the size the sync can take a while)
– Open the shared folder with Nitro on my iPad, flag and rank
– Open the folder with Nitro on my Mac – all the changes made on my iPad are picked up immediately (sync is super quick because it’s only the xmp files changing). I can even have both apps open at the same time and Nitro Mac updates as soon as the xmp file has synced, which is awesome
– Edit and Export on the Mac

It’s really nice, and is making getting through my backlog of photos much easier. So thanks!

The one not-quite-seamless part is if I edit the image on the iPad after I’ve opened Nitro on the Mac. Understandably, Nitro has cached a bunch of data and doesn’t realize that they need updating.

For thumbnails this is easily fixed by manually running Image > Build Thumbnails, and Edit mode always seems to render correctly. What I haven’t worked out how to fix though is the 1-UP/Viewer mode. Lets say I crop a 3×2 image to 4×5 on the iPad. Opening the image in the viewer on the Mac shows the 3×2 image distorted to fit a 4×5 ratio. Or sometimes it will show the 4×5 image stretched to 3×2. Usually toggling edit mode on and off is enough to fix it, but not always. I’ve tried clearing the cache in settings, but it didn’t seem to help.

Honestly, the benefit of metadata auto-syncing is so large that I’m happy to just deal with this manually if I have to, but if there’s another setting somewhere that I’ve missed to completely clear the cache, I’d love to know.

Cheers,

Ben

[Nik Bhatt]

There are probably some bugs with stale data in that use case. The app has to rebuild its thumbnails and previews and then update the viewer. It probably does not do that perfectly when the aspect ratio changes.

[Author]

Posts