So I haven’t had any need to go at my photo collection for some time, but I’m now looking at it again. Aperture has long since been end of lifed, a pity really it was quite good in it’s day but not having been updated in ages hasn’t done it any favours. I stuck with it because it was familiar and I’d paid for the damn thing but now it’s time to move on.

Apple’s path is to move to the Photo’s app, which is OK for looking at photo’s but it’s editing is a bit of a let down, not that I do a whole load of editing but when I want to do it it’s generally more than Photo’s offers.

Recently I had an image taken on an iPhone with alot of noise and that was going to be the test if Photo’s was going to work long term, to be honest it couldn’t do much. So I decided to give LightRoom a try, they have a 30 day free trail so it was worth a shot.

LightRoom Mobile

After installing the desktop app the next time was to import the photo from the iPhone. To do that I decided to give LightRoom mobile a shot at the same time. Wow that app seems great! I added the photo’s from my camera roll to a new collection (LightRoom speak for album I think) and it synced it up to desktop through Adobe’s cloud. It was fast and easy, the app itself gives a good bit of details on the photo using clever multi tap gestures and has basic editing which seems very workable even on a phone. So far I’m impressed.

LightRoom Editing

So the photo I synced was easy to access in the desktop application in LightRooms ‘Library’ section, the next step was to try out the noise reduction so you move the workflow to the ‘Develop’ tab. Now there’s an awful lot in this tab but Adobe’s help website seems very good Noise Help following that I was able to get some pretty decent results, I’m not a pro editor by any means but 10 minutes of effort really made an improvement to the photo. Best of all the edits were synced back to the iPhone, this I’m liking alot as most of the photo’s I take now are with the phone and while the camera is good the images tend to have alot of noise.

Import Aperture Libary

So now that I’m impressed enough it’s time to see what the whole library looks like in LightRoom. My library is reasonably sized, 80GB with around 17,000 photos. I have a load of hard drive space though as I have an SSD for the main drive and a 1TB drive for the photo’s so I’m not concerned about duplicating the photo’s in the short term.

That went surprising well, there a few duplicates caused by it picking up previews but otherwise fairly painless… so far