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My Photography Workflow with Lightroom, SmugMug, and iPad Pro

·2 mins
Photography Photography

Ever since I bought iPad, I have tried to make it my main computing device. I love the form factor. I love many apps on it. I have really started to enjoy many photography apps on it. Touch screen makes a lot of sense for photo editing. Snapseed, Apple Photos, Affinity Photo are my favorite photo apps on the iPad. But it has been hard to incorporate it in my photography workflow.

So my current workflow looks like this:

Import Photos on Macbook Pro via Lightroom 6
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I am still using Lightroom 6 because I don’t want to pay $10 every month for Lightroom Classic CC. I use Lightroom because I have photos and videos on multiple devices. Lightroom makes it really easy to move photos around. I move older photos to a NAS drive.

Copy photos via rsync to shared NAS Folder
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I backup new photos to a shared folder on NAS drive. I have a simple script that runs once a day but I can execute anytime I like.

Import photos on my wife’s laptop
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While we can simply plug in the camera in her laptop and she can import photos but it is just easier to import from NAS drive.

So at this point, we have 3 local backups of photos.

Sync Photos on Google Photos
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Google Drive syncs photos and videos too.

Backup Photos on SmugMug
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SmugMug is not a backup solution but it provides unlimited storage for your photos. I use SmugMug mostly to share my photos with family and friends. But I have set up smart folders that backup all photos. This way I have two offsite “backups”. Remember these are not true backups but something for worst case scenarios.

If you want to try SmugMug, use my referral link for a discount for both, you and me.

Check Photos on iPad
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I use Google Photos app to see synced photos, I might cull them there and it would delete those photos on my MacBook. But mostly use iPad for light editing and sharing photos with friends and family on Instagram or privately.

I can also download full resolution photos using SmugMug app on iPad but that is rarely ever needed.

Related

My New Photography Workflow with iPad Pro and Lightroom 6

·4 mins
Photography Photography
Update: Here is my current workflow. Now that I have a 10.5" iPad Pro, I am trying real hard to use it as a productive machine, possibly as a main machine. Unfortunately, it has been a challenge. I almost want to return it but I really love the form factor of iPad. I am hoping that in the next few updates, it will be almost usable as a main machine. For programming, I am in love with mosh shell. Yes this is cheating by doing real work on a VPS but it is actually an enjoyable experience.

FTP from Lightroom

·1 min
Photography Photography
I signed up on a few microstock sites hoping to recoup some of the cost of my camera. These sites provide FTP access for easy uploading photos. Lightroom doesn’t come with an easy way to publish or export photos to FTP site. But Lightroom SDK comes with a free sample plugin that can export photos to an FTP site. It works really well and is very easy to install. I learned this at LightroomSolutions.com.

Lightroom & Smugmug Workflow

·5 mins
Photography Photography
Now that I have a new fancy camera, I have tried to organize my photos better. Over the years I have collected about 70GB of photos. It seems a lot to me but apparently there are many people with well over 1000 GB of photos. The biggest challenge with so many photos is that it is hard to organize them. Upon several recommendations and some searches on the web, it seems Lightroom is the best software for organizing and managing photos.