You kept that up for a long time anyway.
George
f/64??? It should have been obvious that was posted as a joke. None of my lenses even goes to f/64. Maybe I should have used f/500 and 1/20,00th? That was a freak example of a photo, which I never saw until I looked at the images. on my computer, as the mirror was up at that moment.
I havenât asked any serious questions in ages, and I am currently pleased with my results from PhotoLab. I very much am thankful for the replies I got when I didnât understand PL tools well enough. Most of my concerns lately have nothing to do with PL.
Sounds like a good idea for lots of reasons, and questions like that would be on-topic, not off-topic. I agree completely.
Maybe they seem that way, but that wasnât the intent. Iâm doing what DxO seemed to be asking for, and only posting them in an off-topic thread. When/if I do have a serious question, I will gladly follow your advice, and post in a separate thread, specific for that particular photo and need to improve it. What this thread is good at, is for other people to post their own impressions of images I captured. Again, thatâs what DxO seems to have had in mind, feedback.
Iâm sure a huge part of my current picture taking has a LOT to do with questions asked, and answered, in the past few years. When I get home, and open my images in PL, I feel much better about them than I used to, even a year ago. Most, if not all, obvious mistakes have been corrected. When I open an image in PL, Iâm mostly trying to âadjustâ things, not âfixâ things. The quality of my images is mostly limited by ME, not by my camera, or lens, or the processing software. I enjoy what Iâm doing, and enjoy the results. When others edit my photos, I think of their efforts as their own way to see things, not a âcorrectionsâ. I think many people here are serious, and I think more than a few are âsillyâ. I see no immediate need or desire to buy new photo gear, which is a first. I also appreciate all the âoff-topicâ help, with things I had a very poor understanding of, such as camera data. Now it makes a lot more sense to me, but I barely understand a lot of it. Switching from Lightroom to PhotoLab is one of the best choices I made, but I think my life would be similar, had I never changed.
I completely agree with Joanna that when/if I have my next âseriousâ question, it should be posted in a new thread with an appropriate title, and hopefully that (those) threads will remain more on-track, and not wander off into never-never-land. This thread will remain âoff-topicâ, whatever that means.
Amen. Ite fabula est. Spero.
No lens, just a pinhole (and some PP). So, is it a photo?
Oh Mike, that IS an inefficient suboptimal mess! - especially if your main converter today is Photolab.
I thought I read you have used PhotoMechanic 20 years and that you bought PM Plus 6 a couple of years ago. I just don´t understad why you bought PM Plus if it wasn´t because you wnated the Picture-DAM-functionality. The only reason i know of when people buy the Plus-version is that they intend to build a searchable archive where all their pictures can be searchable through one common interface.
You say you have 11 322 picture still in Lightroom, which tell me you really never migrated from Lightroom to Photolab. So when you are searching for some pictures of yours you have to search both in Lightroom and Photolab??
You know one of the reasons I bought PM Plus is that it âUNLIKEâ both Lightroom and Photolab can scale much better. One side of that is that it is capable of doing unified searches over multiple catalogs. So it is really possible to have two or more catalogs and search them simultaneously. The only thing needed is indexing the Lightroom-handled files (after exporting XMP from Lightroom and then doing the same with the Photolab controlled files.
The way you have rigged your environment you miss the whole point with the integration between PhotoMechanic Photo DAM and Photolab´s PictureLibrary, as I aleady have described for you. It seems that you spend a lot of money on software you don´t even use properly.
Good for you Darktable is for free - if you don´t value your own time all that much.
Sure, but itâs my mess. All that old stuff is âhistoryâ.
If I understand you correctly, yes, it is technically a camera.
I figured eventually, I would get it figured out. Whatâs the rush? 
Yes, assuming I still remember how to do so, and the old software still works.
Yikes - maybe in my next lifetime. I also have my Windows based Lenovo W530 which is all Lightroom, and PM from long agoâŚ
I agree, but I want to be able to teach people how to use DarkTable. As I recall, Darktable wasnât that difficult to use, for basic stuff.
Hmm, I miss YOUR whole point. Next week Iâll talk to my support person at Camera Bits, and move to the next step.
Lightroom was working perfectly, when I first read about PhotoLab. Iâm very happy I switched. Hmm, maybe I should say it was working just like people told me it could work. Getting back my old photos isnât a rush. They are on my Windows laptop, my iMac, my Mac mini, and my MacBook Pro. Do I remember how to do all that stuff??? Heck no!!!
I never gave you a proper reply. When Adobe Lightroom was changing from a purchased program to prescription, I decided to move to something else, which turned out to be PhotoLab. I never migrated anything - I made a fresh start, using PhotoLab. At some point I bought the newest version of PhotoMechanic, which was also capable of doing something similar to Lightroomâs catalog, but I never set that up until very recently. Is the old stuff a âmessâ? It is what it is, and I rarely use it any more. If there are 11,000 plus photos there, they are also on my Windows Lenovo W530 laptop, and my Apple computers as I moved from one to the next. I copied all my photos and software each time, so as of today, ALL my old files from anything should now be on my Apple 2018 Mac mini. I also had my MacBook Pro, which used to have my photos as I traveled, also in PhotoMechanic, and long ago in Lightroom, but the past several years in PhotoLab.
There was a âglitchâ when my old MacBook Pro was getting too old, and needed yet another battery. I bought a new 2023 MacBook Pro, and took it with me on my last trip to India. It had the latest version of PhotoLab, PhotoMechanic, and everything else. I was unaware of how much better Appleâs M2 chip was compared to my Mac miniâs Intel chip - exporting photos from the mini took a minute per photo because of the lack of a graphics chip - but on the MacBook Pro, it took just a fraction of a second. Making a long story shorter, I moved the mini to a different table, and I am now using the MacBook Pro (with a 27" display) to my desk, and I have been using the MacBook Pro as my main computer from then on. All my old photos (prior to February 2024) are on the Mac mini. The MacBook Pro has all photos since December 2023.
If I knew how, I would move all my photos from the Mac mini to a good external drive, and plug that into my MacBook Pro. But I was told in this forum that DxO PhotoLab (from my Mac mini) would be a problem importing old photos from one computer to another. All my computers are now backed up on Appleâs Time Machine.
@Stenis, you are correct that this is sort of a mess, with pictures dating back to my first digital camera stored in Lightroom, then PhotoLab, first on my Windows laptop, and then on my Mac mini desktop, and currently on my MacBook Pro.
Life has all sort of stuff like this, moving from 8" floppy disksk to 5" floppies, to 3" floppies, and CDâs, changing to DVDâs, and my video going through 8mm, to 16mm, to digital first in Beta, then ED-Beta, then VHS to S-VHS, then to all the constantly improving video formats. My head is spinning now just to think about this. Some of this old media, and my old computers, I still have. Some I sold. Some I gave away. Even for video formats, and editors, I have a lot of my old media, but fortunately I saved most of the videos in old formats that I can still access when/if I need to.
Do I want to talk about cameras? Nope, but I still have many of my favorites, only one of which (Leica M3) I have had cleaned and updated. Film, then digital, then better digital, more and more megapixels until Iâm now at 24. Lots of old lenses, most of which I sold, but now I have lenses for Nikon and Leica. I called it âquitsâ when Mirrorless came out - and it seems like once again, were I to buy one, it would be obsolete by the following year and Iâd want to replace it. What I have now is âstaticâ; no need or desire for anything newer. Ditto for computers - at 80 years old, my new MacBook Pro should last me as long as I live, and I could replace my Intel Mac mini with a newer one, with 2 TB of hard drive, lots of RAM, and maybe then I might have all my âstuffâ in one place. Images changed from jpg to RAW several years back, but that should be no problem. Eventually I would want to learn how I can transfer everything from my current computers so itâs all in one place, if I live long enough to get around to this. âŚI wonder what and when will replace âRAWâ for image files?
Bottom line, Iâve got lots of âoldâ stuff", and Iâve got a new MacBook Pro laptop with my photos since last December. It has lots of image editors that Iâve already paid for, but the only one I use regularly is PhotoLab and most of the DxO software that works with PhotoLab. I also have special image software for things I rarely do nowadays, such as PhotoMatix.
Iâve also got the newest version of DarkTable, which I now know the basics of. Works fine, but I can obviously do better with all the PhotoLab software Iâve got. Iâm also wasting money every month, not that much, on the Adobe Photography Plan, which means whenever I need PhotoShop, if available and up to date. Iâll have to check if those 11,000 Lightroom images still open as they should on my Mac mini, but the original images should be safe and reliable even if I dump Lightroom.
@Stenis, I doubt that this will answer all your questions, but itâs a partial explanation. Mark seem to think Iâm turning old and senile, but my Clinical Psychologist thinks that for 80, Iâm doing fine. My two biggest âhobbiesâ are Photography and Bullseye Shooting. The people who look at my shooting targets think they are great. You guys get to see my photos every so often - a few I think are great, most are average, and a few are pathetic. Iâm not sure what the rest of you think. I enjoy it, but my past enthusiasm for buying new âstuffâ has vanished. Iâve got an overwhelming amount of learning to do just on my existing âstuffâ.
Not sure why Iâm even posting this info now.
Perhaps I should take a break, and stop posting in this forum.
I could easily do without the controversy.
For a starter, I should come here once a day, and maybe later, once a week. If DxO does start the DxO Cafe, one of you should volunteer to be the moderator, if they want one. Not me.
I use C1 but I donât use catalogues, I use Sessions.
C1 gives you choices.
Can I ask what you mean by C1, catalogues, and Sessions?
Try typing those words into Google
I guess if I wanted to use Capture One, which I donât, then this would matter. Apparently one more Image Editor.
Thank you.
For me, when I want to access any of my photos, which are all stored in the same folder hierarchy, I just find them in my metadata app and I can open them in any editor I wish to useâŚ
So far, so good, but my photos are all stored in different folders under my main Photos listing in Finder.
For most of my PhotoLab images, I go to:
Photos > 2024 (or whatever) > _month > folder name
My old Lightroom photos are in a different folder.
My old Adobe Lightroom file from a previous computer are here
âŚand my gazillion Lightroom images are not on this computer yet - theyâre on my 2017 iMac, and were copied to my 2018 Mac mini.
I donât mind if I lose the data for all my Lightroom photos, as I can import all of them into PhotoLab (if thatâs not going to overwhelm PhotoLab, which I havenât yet looked into. On my MacBook Pro, under Pictures, I can create a folder named âMiscellaneousâ and relocated my old stuff from decades ago into that folder.
Anyway, thatâs the plan - if you think your software would be good for me, we can discuss this in a few weeks.
I need to clean this mess up, and organize it, but without damaging PhotoLab.
Why on earth would you want to import them into PhotoLab?
It is a raw processor, not a DAM!
I would suggest you import them into your Photo Mechanic DAMâŚ
Often Mike has issues articulating what he actually means. First, of course there is no formal import feature in PhotoLab. I believe all heâs really saying is that If he needs to re-edit an image originally done in Lightroom he will just do it from scratch in PhotoLab instead. Since his edits are generally so minimal anyway, I guess he figures itâs not that big a deal for him If he has to start over on a few images here and there.
Of course, there is always the real possibility that he thinks that he can take an edited Lightroom image and continue editing it in PhotoLab with all the original LR edits still available for modification in PhotoLab. Hopefully he is aware that It is not possible to do that, but I canât say it for certain.
Mark
Correct. I can write off any and all work I did in Lightroom, and start over again in PhotoLab, but the older ones especially are in jpg format, as thatâs what I used long ago.
When you talk about importing, you are implying that you need, and make use of a DAM? Lightroom already provides one, but you are also talking about Photo Mechanic that you use to âingestâ your images.
Let me ask a fundamental question - do you really need a DAM at all?
Itâs all very well and good adding all that metadata but⌠what do you do with it, once itâs there?
Obviously searching must be an absolute must but, on what attributes do you need to search? Keywords come to mind, but what else?
The date the picture was taken
Where the picture was taken
What camera was used.
What (who?) is the picture of.
What company/facility/whatever is/was involved
Color or B&W ? Raw or jpg?
Iâm sure there are more, but for photos I took in 2015 in India, this would be helpful.
If I wanted to search for all my photos of insert name here_ that would be handy.
Lightroom was over-kill for me.
PhotoMechanicâs ability to show me a gazillion thumbnails at a time is great.
Iâm sure I havenât thought of the majority of the possible search criteria.
