Since there are rumors still going around of a possible 13" iPad Air, I thought a picture showing a 13" Surface Pro 3 would help give some perspective.
In the photo, from bottom to top, is a Microsoft Surface Pro 3, an iPad Air, an iPad mini, an iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 6 and an iPhone 5.
For the last two years I have used Aperture for storing, organizing and sharing our photos. It wasn't the perfect photo solution, which I've blogged about more than once, when it came to wirelessly getting photos from several devices in to the Aperture library. I did however like how much flexibility it provided me for organization. I know that Lightroom had really good organizational features, but it didn't play well with my iOS devices and Photostream wasn't supported, which made wirelessly uploading my photo's impossible at the time.
The stars have since aligned, with Aperture being discontinued and Adobe releasing Lightroom for iOS, I now have the opportunity to move over to Lightroom and actually end up with a much better solution. After getting all settled in with Lightroom, I am now able to take a picture on my iPhone, open Lightroom on my iPad and make edits, then open up Lightroom on my Mac or Windows PC and have the original photo and it's edits already ready for me to add keywords to and organize. Even better yet, is that my wife's iPhone has Lightroom on it, and every picture she takes, shows up on both of my iOS devices and on our two computers, without any issues. Well worth the $10 a month it's costing, plus I get Photoshop for my machines and iOS devices, so it's a great value for the price.
I downloaded and installed Lightroom mobile on my iPhone and my two iPads. Then I downloaded and installed Lightroom mobile on my wife's iPhone and her iPad. Finally, I downloaded Lightroom for my Windows machine and my Mac (technically the same machine, just dual booted). Next, I created a collection on my iOS devices, one collection per device. When you create a new collection on a device, you can tell it to auto-import your camera roll. It will automatically upload your photo's to the Lightroom cloud, and sync them to all of your devices, in the background.
Once each of our devices has a collection created, and has the auto-import enabled, we see all of the collections on all of our devices. This allows us to take a picture on any device, and not have to deal with sending to photostream or AirDropping a large number of files. Our photo's just show up on all our devices. If you want, you could create a single collection, and assign it to auto-import on all devices, so all of your photo's go into 1 collection from all devices. We chose to create one collection per device though so we could make finding a photo easier. I know my wife snapped a photo of my daughter on her iPad, so I just go to her iPad collection from my phone and find it.
Here, you can see all of our collections easily accessible on my iPad.
Now that all of our mobile devices were set up with Lightroom, I launched Lightroom on my Mac and discovered that the collections were available there without any set up. Now I can easily select the photo's and import them in to my library, add keywords, edit them and back them up.
One of the other cool features of Lightroom is that I can select any photo from my library, add them to a collection and enable mobile sync on the collection. Now any photo I add to the custom collection will sync to all of our mobile devices. Extremely easy.
You can technically sync photo's to iOS from Aperture and iPhoto as well, using Photostream. The difference between Photostream and Lightroom Collections is that Photostream still syncs down the photo to your device (albeit a small version), while Lightroom only syncs a thumbnail. Since majority of the time, users won't actually open all 500 photo's to view on their device, you only need 500 thumbnails. As you can see from my photo above, I have 142 photo's from my wife's iPhone, but it's only using 31mb of storage. When you open a photo to view the full photo, Lightroom downloads the full-resolution for you to see. Much better!
With Aperture/iOS, I could share photo's with my wife through Photostream as well, but my wife would end up saving the photo to her camera roll and a duplicate ultimately ended up in my Aperture library. I would spend a lot of time removing duplicates. Luckily, it seems that Lightroom is smart enough to not import duplicates. Another benefit is that I don't have to manually upload 20 photo's that I just took of my daughter to Photostream for her to see. They just show up in our Lightroom.
If I wanted to have a photostream per device, it made things even more complex. Take a picture on my iPhone, and upload to photostream, then take a picture on my iPad 5 minutes later and manually upload to photostream again. With Lightroom, we can take pictures on any device at any time and not deal with uploading. Lightroom handles it all for us with less effort.
Lightroom calls their version of Tags, Keywords. I downloaded an app on my iPad called Photosmith, that lets you create a collection of photos on your Mac (or Windows) and sync the collection of photo's to your iPad. You can then add keywords, edit the photo's, name them and then sync the changes back to Lightroom. It's a great way to 'tag' photo's while on the go. Until the Lightroom Mobile apps support keywording, I'll use Photosmith to do all my keywording while on the go. It's a bit difficult to set up initially, but in the end it works pretty well.
This process is by far the best photo syncing solution I've found, after several years of messing with trying to take care of syncing to the computers wirelessly and sharing across all devices.
I've had iOS 7 on my device since it was released to developers last June and I really have got to liking the background fetching feature added to it. I have several apps that make use of it and in some cases, allows me to not even use the app.
For instance, I have OneDrive on my devices for the sole purpose of wirelessly uploading all of my photos and videos to OneDrive (I'll save why OneDrive & not Flickr for another post) and syncing to my computer. This lets me move them in to aperture when I am ready. Never have to plug my phone in, nor open OneDrive on my phone. It just does it in the background for me.
My podcast app is always up to date with the latest and greatest podcasts which is nice and in most cases my RSS reader is updated before I open it.
This is probably my favorite feature of iOS 7.
I can see potentially editing photo's stored within Lightroom on my Mac while I am out and on my iPad. It's unfortunate though that they did not ship the iPhone version with it at the same time.
The work flow that would have me signing up for the creative cloud in an instant is the syncing of my photo's wirelessly from my iPhone to my Mac and iPad. Right now, as far as I can tell, I would have to take the picture on my phone, plug the phone in to the iPad via a camera connection kit and import in order to sync the photo's across my devices.
The fact that Photostream only syncs full-sized images back to the Mac (reduced sizes across iOS devices, so not originals), means that I can't rely on Photostream to carry my photo's from iPhone to iPad and Lightroom.
Until Lightroom ships on the iPhone, so that I can take a picture and sync the original file to my Mac and the thumbnail to my iPad, I can't justify paying for a service that seems half-baked.
I'd be happy if they just provided a temporary work-around by shipping a "Lightroom Sync" app to the iPhone that pulled my phone's Camera Roll photo's and pushed them to my Mac, with no other features.
So I guess I'll just have to continue waiting for a perfect syncing platform.
I've been spending time thinking on the topic of entertainment lately. Pondering if we as a society have to much of it.
For instance, on my iPad I have 111 games out of my 309 installed apps, 45 games on my iPhone. On my Steam library I have well over 100 games, bought and paid. None of these games I have finished, more than half haven't even been played more than 5 minutes.
I have 17 podcast subscriptions, which produces 42 new episodes for me to listen to each week. Because of the quantity of podcasts I listen to. (I enjoy them!) I can't keep up with my audible subscription, where I currently have 19 books totaling 341 hours of audio, with unspent credits for redeeming books and unspent cash credits.
My commute round-trip is usually just shy of two hours everyday and I can usually get in 2-3 hours of content while I listen and work; I still can't keep up with my audio entertainment, let alone all of the video games and movie bundles we've acquired lately.
Throw in your social networks and RSS feeds and you find yourself swimming in so much media that you have no time to do other stuff, like play one of those games I haven't touched yet.
There are so many sales now-a-days that sometimes it's hard not to buy stuff. I wonder what impact cramming so much content in our busy schedules will ultimately do to you. Raising a new born, working full-time and starting a independent start up company leaves little time for entertainment, and yet I buy, and buy and buy.
So my new goal is to stop buying content, weed out my podcasts and finish what I have before I go any further with buying more stuff. Even when it's on sale.
