Switching from Aperture to Lightroom, and a few other updates.

   Here comes another photography blog with no pictures in it. A while back now, Apple announced that Aperture was effectively dead. This made me sad, since I have come to use it quite heavily and had something on the order of 20,000 images between my personal and professional aperture libraries. I initially tried Lightroom, but the interface and organization wasn't as intuitive or easy for me as Aperture. So I went with Aperture. I spend a bit of money on plug ins, and a lot of time on learning to use the software. While I may not have reached ultimate ninja warrior status, I think I certainly was approaching a black belt level workflow. So it kinda felt like a betrayal and sting of death when I got the news. But, as annoying as it seemed, it is pretty useless to rail against what you can't control, so I decided to figure out how to make the transition and when. The end of the year seemed like a good time for a clean break.

  Since I had been using aperture as a managed library, this was going to mean pretty much a complete reorganization of everything, so I decided it would also be  good time to make a few other changes. I was almost out of storage space on my main drives and my computer was old and slow. I decided why not fix all of that at once, I mean, if you're cliff jumping there's no halfway right? The only issue was money. I really didn't have the cash flow to upgrade the computer. Enter a conversation with another photographer and friend who also works off a macbook, who suggested I upgrade to a solid state hard drive, which would seriously up the performance on my current macbook. I did some research and found out that would cost just a fraction of my most conservative computer upgrade plans, so I ordered a 1tb SSD and had it installed. At the same time I ordered some larger external drives to use as my workhorses.

 He was right, the performance increase is insane. Before the upgrade, for example, it took 7-10 minutes for my laptop to boot up. Now it takes approximately 90 seconds. Photoshop work is almost instantaneous, even working with full resolution images from the D800. This will definitely hold me over for a while. Drive wise I am now using a La Cie 4TB external drive as my main professional drive. My only off site backup is the images I upload to my website, which is driven by photo shelter,  so I am sort of paranoid about my backups at home. So for my backup drive, I went with the IoSafe Solo. This will be my second Solo. I using a partitioned 3gb solo drive to backup both my personal hard drive and my 2gb pro drive. I still use 1gb of that one for backup of my personal hard drive and images (as well as an encrypted cloud backup, but that is too expensive and slow to use for my working files) and the remaining 2gb will be my archive storage for my old aperture library. While I have (luckily) not had to test the resilience of these drives, they give all the appearances of being the tanks they are marketed as. The drives are basically water and fire resistant safes with USB ports, and even pretty likely that house burglars would leave them alone, since they weigh about as much as a small car and are bolted to my desk.

  So, upgraded computer, new drives ready to go. It was time to figure out how the hell to move from aperture to lightroom. First off I decided migrating my whole professional catalogue was a non-starter, I would be using up almost half of the space in my new drive before I even started, so the 2014 and earlier Happy Dragon photo images will remain an aperture library. I did decide to switch them from managed to referenced masters so it will be easier to retrieve the raw files later if I need to. But my personal images I wanted to move with me since I do go back all the time and look at those. Adobe did add an Import from Aperture function in the most recent 5.7 lightroom update, but importing using that would have put all my files into folders organized by date only, which is not how I organized everything. So I decided to do it the hard way. I first switched my whole personal library from managed to referenced, which preserved at least the higher level folder structure for my images. Then I imported that framework into my new lightroom catalogue. The sub-folder hierarchy, alas, did not translate. I am not sure if I could have fixed this somehow, but I didn't and now it's done, so I am about halfway through rebuilding the subfolder hierarchy in my new personal LR catalogue.

    Then it was time to start slowly learning the new interface and developing a new workflow. Am I there yet? Hell no, it took me two years to get to a decent level of proficiency with Aperture, it's been two months roughly with Lightroom. But already I can see that most of my real issue with the program was just that "this is different....." and change isn't easy for me, I get pretty set in my ways and attached to things and processes. Now that I have used it for a bit, although I still struggle with some of the differences, and I am still not really a fan of navigating  the library folder panel, there are quite a few advantages to LR I have found, and I am quickly becoming a convert. I can't really geek out and use numbers to back this up, but I think Apple gave up on Aperture long before the announcement and stopped developing it. Adobe, on the other hand, has kept the press on. It's totally subjective, but I feel like the adjustment sliders in LR have a lot more range and power than the aperture equivalents. Aperture had better adjustment brushes, but the LR gradients are awesome.

  Another huge change is the file management system. While it isn't as easy to navigate for me as Aperture's project setup was, it is more flexible and provides me with a new setup I am really liking. Instead of a library for my personal images and a second library for my professional images, I now have one catalogue, since LR makes it easy to spread images from a single catalogue over multiple drives. While I could have done the same thing in aperture using referenced files vice mastered, I don't think moving images around in aperture would have moved them around externally the way moving them in LR does. (maybe it would have, but oh well, that wasn't the way I had my aperture system set up). Another way this really helps me is that when I first shoot a set of work images, now when I import them initially from the camera I put them into a working folder that resides on my internal SDD (which is now big enough to be used for this purpose) and backed up onto my external drive. That way, while I am working on those images, I get the full speed advantage of the solid state drive, and I also don't have to cart around an external drive to work on my files. When the images are done, it's quick, easy and seamless to move them within lightroom onto my external drive. If that gets too unwieldy, I can even still put the images on my external drive, and just keep smart previews on my internal drive to work on while I am away from home. This really makes life easier when I can just grab my laptop and wacom tablet and bring them on the ship with me to work on images without carting around a whole external drive.

  There's another thing that I just found that makes it even better. Lightroom Mobile! This is freaking awesome, and may be the sole forcing factor in getting me to move to the creative cloud subscription after all. Now, when I get home late and dump my images from a show onto my working folder, I also put them into a collection which automatically syncs with LR mobile. While I get dressed in the AM, I sync my iPad and make sure those images are downloaded into LR mobile for offline work. Then, when I am stuck in horribly boring and pointless meetings at work, or stop of at a bar on the way home,  I can pull out the iPad and sort through the images, do my initial reviews, rating and selection process, and make some simple, initial edits. Then, when I get home, all that work automatically updates and when I fire up the laptop, the culling process is mostly done and I am ready to start the edits. This is awesome. Also, the other main reason I was staying away from the creative cloud is that it wouldn't work if I was on deployment and out to sea for longer than a month (or 3 with annual subscription) without the software being able to phone home. Since it looks like I probably only have two more months out to sea in my naval career, that roadblock seems to no longer be the issue it was. Which brings me to my final point.

  This process of switching over to Lightroom was a reminder that was perfectly timed. It reminded me that although it is easy for me to get stuck in a certain process and way of doing things and become very resistant to change, it isn't necessarily the horrible catastrophe I initially fear it to be. Change and upheaval will seldom be easy, learning new ways of doing things and developing new processes is hard. But if you stick with it, it can definitely be worth it and can actually open amazing new doors and opportunities. I definitely learned that when I went through my divorce, but I guess I was starting to forget, and it's nice to have a reminder right about now, because a couple of weeks ago I found out that my navy career is pretty much over. I got passed over for command, which means that I statistically have a better chance of getting struck by lightening while purchasing a winning lottery ticket than I do of promoting again, and if I don't promote again I will be retired in 3 years whether I want to be or not. There are many bright sides to this, namely I won't have to worry about long stretches away from my family and friends anymore. But it's also scary, because I am nowhere near financially ready for it. I was hoping to make a little off of my book, but that was pretty much dead on arrival, and other than a few little gigs, I haven't cracked the code of how to earn anything from photography. I still have a load of debt from the divorce and am in no way ready financially to retire and still provide for the family.

   But, as life seems to be reminding me, painful change and learning a new way to proceed can be very rewarding. More to follow. In conclusion, I hereby recant all the foul things I may have said in the past about lightroom and the adobe creative cloud. It will take a while to get as proficient with LR as I was with aperture, but it will be worth it and I think I will find even more new features and tricks to make life easier. The rest will take care of itself somehow, I have 3 years to figure it out.