[Sead]

I have finally decided to devote time and re-arrange mess of my photo library that was left with demise of Apple Aperture. Not even Microsoft was ever able to make a chaos Apple has done with abandoning Aperture. I hate Apple for that.

Since I share the photos with family members, I have decided to try with Apple Photos. I felt also the chances for consolidating photo library from multiple iPhoto Libraries that left as moot effort to transfer my Aperture Library, present iPhone Photo, endless number of photo folders and using Photos duplicate finder to get rid of approx 30.000+ duplicates would make sense.

Days later I got everything I have into a single Photos library and duplicate finder has kicked in. All looked fine… Until I have realised that Apple Photos merges photos in the most disgustful way – RAW files gets deleted in favour of JPG, smaller JPG gets chosen versus larger JPG and so on. I could not believe the mess it creates with merging of duplicates. Too bad I have noticed this only after I have purged 5.000+ merged duplicates (merge is really just a matter od discarding versions Apple chooses into trash bin for 30 days but you have a chance to purge them immediately – which I, in my naivety, have chosen to do).

It would have been the game over for my photo library if I was not burned in the past and kept backup of all my photos mess, but I have to start the next effort to consolidate and organise my photos.

Interesting enough, before resorting to duplicate finder in Photos, I have tried multiple apps for finding duplicated in Photos libraries and none of them have worked.

Yeah, and the “live” photos from iPhone export as 2-3 sec mov files. But, when you import it again to Photos, it will not recognise it as live photos but will import it as a movie clip. Yet another thing that adds to the mess, instead of helping it out.

Think it is all? Nah, there is more – imports from my Ricoh GR4 Raw+JPEG don’t get stacked but are treated as duplicates where, as you may already figure out, in merging process RAW gets deleted and JPEG is kept.

[Sead]

Thank you Rick and Nik.

If it was a simple choice, I would have selected one already. 🙂

With Aperture proprietary system, in panic, I have not done the cleanest of the exports of the library and I have ended up with a mess of the “library”. I was frustrated almost to the point to give up on photography (which I did for couple of years). So, I am with Rick on issue of file handling.

I still have to deal with serious number of duplicates, part of library in Photos, part of the photos (mostly iPhone ones) in second Photos library (synced to iCloud) and half of the photos in a partly structured and partly just a dump folders. Frankly, I don’t even know where and how to start sorting the structure and duplicates. Choice between Photos and File system will greatly influence the methodology in sorting out the duplicates.

Then, there is question of printing. During testing I did not see print option in Nitro and that is something that Photos have on the basic quality level (like everything else in Photos – all bells and whistles and more are there but for mainstream users at best, lacking for HQ use, at least for those of us who want to use ICC profiles for printing and other more elaborate aspects of handling photos).

Another question for me is sharing photos with family and clients. iCloud makes it easy but is there anything out there that does not necessarily involve iCloud?

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