Software recommendations for downloading, storing, and editing images

MvdS — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 13:57:24 GMT

Hi guys. I’ve got an 8 GB iMac, and a canon M50 mark II. I’ve always used my IMac Photos program for my basic editing. As my photography advanced I need to change the way I’m downloading/storing/editing. I’m now also shooting in RAW sometimes which takes more storage on my Mac. I’ve tried to use the canon Digital Photo professional 4editing programme, but I’m not sure if what I do is the most convenient way.
I would be really interested to hear what you are using and how you do it ; from getting the pictures off your camera ( via memory stick/wire/wireless? ) and storing the files ( do you store them all in apple photos? or in the canon DPP4 programme or just in files in documents?) to editing it in a programme ( DPP4, lightroom, adobe?).
also : do you keep your RAW photos on your Mac or edit and delete them asap due to storage?

please help as I’ve got no clue and I can’t see the wood for the trees.

There must be an easy protocol to follow . I’m only a hobby photographer so don’t need fancy stuff. But now I dread downloading as not sure where to store them.
many thanks, Maud

Re: Software recommendations for downloading, storing, and editing images

johnrmoyer — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 21:53:11 GMT

@MvdS wrote:

Hi guys. I’ve got an 8 GB iMac, and a canon M50 mark II. I’ve always used my IMac Photos program for my basic editing. As my photography advanced I need to change the way I’m downloading/storing/editing. I’m now also shooting in RAW sometimes which takes more storage on my Mac. I’ve tried to use the canon Digital Photo professional 4editing programme, but I’m not sure if what I do is the most convenient way.
I would be really interested to hear what you are using and how you do it ; from getting the pictures off your camera ( via memory stick/wire/wireless? ) and storing the files ( do you store them all in apple photos? or in the canon DPP4 programme or just in files in documents?) to editing it in a programme ( DPP4, lightroom, adobe?).
also : do you keep your RAW photos on your Mac or edit and delete them asap due to storage?

please help as I’ve got no clue and I can’t see the wood for the trees.

There must be an easy protocol to follow . I’m only a hobby photographer so don’t need fancy stuff. But now I dread downloading as not sure where to store them.
many thanks, Maud

I hope some of this might be helpful. It is what I do and might not be best for anyone else.

I have a 2019 Intel 27 inch iMac. I have upgraded it to 96GB of RAM using memory sticks I purchased from Crucial. I have a Samsung external SSD for timemachine backups attached to my iMac.

I use the card reader slot on the iMac. Since I sometimes edit only one photo and not an entire card full, I always set the switch on the memory card to write protect. I usually point DPP at the memory card, usually "/Volumes/EOS_DIGITAL/DCIM/100CANON/" for me. I have changed my login shell on both my iMac and my Debian Linux machine to ksh because that is what I have been using since 1987 and csh before that. I sometimes use a command line to make directories (folders) on the iMac instead of using finder. I do not use Apple photos to catalog my photos because I am old fashioned and prefer a command line. One reason for using a command line is that it works the same now as it did in 1984 when I started using Unix (macOS is based upon Unix) and I do not have to learn anything new or worry that my photo catalog software will be obsolete in the future.

The Apple Photos.app that comes with macOS seems to work fine for raw files from my camera. I do not know about your camera. Apple photos will automatically backup photos to iCloud so you do not have to think about it, but I have so many photos that iCloud would be too expensive for me to store all of my photos.

On the iMac, I usually use Canon DPP software for raw files and on the Debian machine rawtherapee.

Other free software I use includes gimp, exiftool, graphics magick, and hugin.

I am old and slow to change and often use command lines on both my iMac and my Debian machine.

Since I have been able to afford enough storage, I never delete a raw file unless I am certain I will never want to look at it again. I do not keep the raw files on my iMac, but on my Debian machine. Most of my disk space is attached to my Debian machine and shared via SMB protocol. I put a backup copy of raw file, edited files, and recipe files on external hard drives. Cloud storage might be better, but is too expensive for me. On the Debian machine, I put backup copies on external hard drives and have crontab jobs that do daily, weekly, and monthly backups to an external hard drive. Yearly backups I do manually to an external hard drive that is not usually power on or connected.

I will make a folder (directory) with the date as part of the name to store photos on my iMac. From a command line, for example, I might do "mkdir ~/photos/2024Jun18" and then have DPP save files to that directory. On my Debian machine, I do the same thing and copy all the raw files to that folder. If I did not have a Debian machine, I could do the same on one or more external drives attached to my iMac.

I do not save the raw file from DPP, although that was my habit several years ago. Now, I save a dr4 recipe file from DPP to have a record of my edits. I can use exiftool or DPP to view these edits later or use DPP to apply the recipe to the raw file again.

If I plan to do further editing in another program like gimp, I save a 16 bit TIFF file from DPP for that purpose, else if I plan nothing more than a downscale for my webserver, I only save a JPEG file at quality level 10 which seems similar to me to the quality level 100 in the JPEG standard. I usually use graphicsmagick to downscale an image, but DPP or Apple Photos or gimp can also do it.

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Software recommendations for downloading, storing, and editing images

Re: Software recommendations for downloading, storing, and editing images