Tonight was the first night I felt tangible progress in Lightroom take place. Which is a relief but also confusing. Because it seems a lot less intense compared to Darktable, but it came across as some intimidating at first. The keyboard shortcuts are setting themselves properly on the shelves in my mind, and my big ass hands can dominate that MacBook’s keyboard. It makes jumping around a lot easier. Almost like playing an instrument. I’m still very confused as to how Lightroom handles files, the support documents indicate I am safe to nuke my originals once they have been synced to the cloud. The thought of doing that made me want to curl up into a ball and cry.
I have gained a lot of insights from Simon d’Entremont on YouTube in regards to Lightroom, and found a lot of value in his video about his workflow.
Initially, it was 60,000 files to the cloud, and oh boy that took almost a week and I’m not joking one bit. It was almost a solid week until all I had the normal cloud icon in the upper right-hand corner. Navigating these files was a complete pain in the ass. You see, I was just so excited to have a camera last year that I never really culled the herd. So I poked online a bit, and stumbled up on a miraculous discovery indeed: Aftershoot.
Aftershoot went thru every photo I have taken since getting my camera last year (cameraversary was on 8 February) and culled them. It categories and star rates you photos for you automatically if you wish, which I found very useful. It’s crazy good with blinking eyes and that extends itself even to even animals. YO BTW: You should be mindful of this if you’re intentionally taking pictures of say a napping cat or a sleeping infant.
During Simon’s video I heard him mention a program called Topaz AI which was great at denoising photos with AI. Some of those first photos, despite most things about them being halfway decent, they were after all taken with the kit lens that came with the camera. I thought I would give it a shot. The results are something out of a science-fiction novel. It is beyond mind blowing.
I’m still very much not accustomed to doing so much shit on my Mac. I spent some quality time digging thru setting in Alfred and realized I’ve only been using it to a minimal degree in all the years I’ve had my back. I’ve got the clipboard settings almost on the same level as I do with CopyQ on Linux. 🤌
DropOver lets you “drop” files into a temporary window, go to a new directory grab some more files and then drop those in too and then you can drop everything in a single place.
Arc has also been up to some great things since I’ve last tinkered with it. To make a long story short, it’s my default browser on the MacBook.
The uploader for SmuMug and a private gallery on my SmugMug site have acted as a good bridge between the Apple Orchid and the Arctic Circle where the Penguins roam but I need to figure out something on a local network level. I know it’s probably unbelievably straightforward. I just haven’t taken the time to do it yet.
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