[Ben Hughes]

I think any cloud storage will let you share folders with people – Mega and Dropbox certainly do.

I’m sure Photos has its benefits, but there’s no way you could convince me to use a proprietary storage format again (I made that mistake with Lightroom back in the day). I’ve changed operating systems, editors and cloud providers multiple times since moving to a file-based approach and it has been essentially seamless. Even though I’m very happy with Apple (and Nitro!) at the moment, having to start from scratch if I ever change my mind is just too much hassle to consider.

Of course if you think you’re going to be in the Apple econsystem forever, maybe Photos makes sense. But even then I find it more frustrating to use than a logically ordered folder structure.

[Ben Hughes]

I’m not saying this is the right way to handle things, but it might give you some ideas. My approach is:

– Use the file system – this means I’m not locked into a cloud storage provider, editor/manager or operating system
– Use XnView to import files into a directory structure based on EXIF (I use YYYY/MM but it’s pretty flexible)
– I use Mega for cloud storage, mostly because I already had it before switching to Mac, but also because I still need to sync to Windows machines and iCloud on Windows is terrible
– Photos I take on my iPhone are automatically uploaded to a folder in Mega and synced to my MBP. I then use XnView to move these into my YYYY/MM folder structure

If I want to edit on both my MBP and iPad, I use syncthing to sync a folder (it works well, with some limitations – https://support.gentlemencoders.com/forums/topic/sharing-edits-between-mac-and-ios/).

[Ben Hughes]

Thanks Nik, that’s working now, and means 90% of my workflow can be done in Nitro 🙂 Do the iOS versions support tags?

From what I understand, the XMP spec supports color labels directly eg <xmp:Label>Red</xmp:Label> – is there a reason Nitro doesn’t use this?

Cheers,

Ben

[Ben Hughes]

Thanks Nik. I agree on the (in)correctness of .jpg.xmp – your approach makes more logical sense. It also makes sense now why you want to always include the extension in the filename for jpg and dng – thanks for the explanation.

It’s a shame that there’s no standardized naming convention across apps. I’ll adjust my workflow until either you (or XnView) allow control over the naming so that I can align them.

One thing I didn’t mention was that Image -> Reconnect XMP Sidecars does not seem to find either {image}.xmp or {image}.jpg.xmp. I was expecting it to at least find {image}.xmp and rename it to {image}_jpg.xmp. If I manually rename {image}.xmp to {image}_jpg.xmp, Nitro immediately recognizes and loads it – so it’s not an issue with the xmp file itself. Have I misunderstood what Reconnect XMP Sidecars does?

Cheers,

Ben

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