After many years of using a combination of LR and Silver Efex Pro (and occasionally PS) on my iMac for predominately monochrome images, I am thinking very seriously of moving to PL6. I have the trial version but have a couple of very basic questions about workflow, so basic that I can’t see many references to either, and wonder if anyone could help, either by answering directly or by pointing me towards previous postings in the forum which would help.
Firstly, my PL6 trial version is installed as a plug-in for LR and not surprisingly defaults to the LR directory structure for Photo Library. If I do migrate, for simplicity the intent would be to get rid of LR altogether and presume the PL6 stand-alone version would include a method of pointing towards a single library of choice, either iMac Pictures or as some have mentioned, a different one labelled for instance My Pictures or similar. I can’t see any indication of this choice on either the plug-in itself, nor, more surprisingly, in the PL6 manual.
Secondly, given that I don’t have many thousands of stored images and have never used anything other than the LR date organised library for browsing, and not relied on keywords for searching, I am not too fussed about the somewhat lesser functionality of the PL6 solution. In these circumstances I would tend towards a subject identified library folder structure, rather than a strict date hierarchy; there seem to be strong feelings pro and con both methods.
Very grateful for any thoughts on either of these issues.
I would suggest you install PL6 as a standalone app and play around with it.
As far as pointing at pictures goes: PL has a file browser built in which allows you to navigate to any directory on your PC and work with your photos there.
Look for video tutorials on the DxO web pages or on YouTube for some excellent help.
Can I pose one additional question? If I go with PL6 as a stand alone application, do people find using Mac OS Pictures an easy tool for importing and browsing (as I said above, I don’t need advanced searching facilities) or would I benefit from using something like Bridge, particularly for the browsing display.
take the memory card and insert it in a card reader
with the Finder, copy the folders containing the image files over to the Mac.
wait until finished
eject the memory card (do not format yet for backup)
Rename folders (and files) as necessary, put folders where they need to be.
I propose you build the new subject based folder structure before you put images in there, maybe use copy instead of move, but this depends on how well you’ve already organized your photo archive.
I’m not aware of a Mac OS app called “pictures”, either it’s “digital images” or “photos”, I believe.
In “photos” I just briefly tried to edit an image with DxO PL but it was not in the list of editors. There sure is a “workaround”, as PL is based one so many workarounds, but: a mixture of a “browser”, whatever app that is, and an editor will hardly give you an overview of the effects of your edits as long as you don’t export the RAWs immediately after it. Browsers usually are optimised for display speed, RAW converters for output quality .
My apologies, I should have made it clearer that I was referring to Pictures in the Mac OS file structure, not to the Mac Photos app. I agree with your comments on Browsers vs Converters; I was wondering firstly about ease of importing to the file structure and cataloguing using something like Bridge compared to platypus’s suggestion above, and secondly to the ability to browse a Bridge type catalogue (even with as yet unprocessed Raw images) rather than using DxO for that purpose and waiting for rendering of the corrections before seeing a decent quality image.
