Sharing images with someone not in Lightroom ecosystem

Question

Hi, this is not strictly "on topic" for this group but as you'll see it could be posted in an Apple community forum or a Microsoft one or and Adobe one or all over the place. I'm trying here because I use Lightroom as a starting point.

I run Lightroom Classic on a PC. I have Lightroom Mobile on my iPad and iPhone. I have a large OneDrive setup available to me.

I also have a Mac with LR Mobile and iCloud on it.

My father has a Mac. He doesn't have Lightroom (nor at his advanced years would I want him to get confused by it really). He does have iCloud.

Dad and I both have "family history" photos - things like photos of their wedding, photos of significant people in the family, photos of myself and my siblings as children, that sort of thing.

We definitely have duplicate copies. He keeps all his in folders on his Apple system in iCloud. He renames images as he sees fit to try to help us understand who is in the images and where they were taken when he is long gone.

He's not using IPCT tags or titles/descriptions, just renames files.

I would like to come up with a way that he can share easily the files with me and I can share back with him - a common pool of images that he can drop things into, I can drop things into, and over time we can tidy through them.

How would you go about that scenario? (Preferably without getting him to try confusing new tools - as he's 90 this year so it's not a small ask to learn a new tool.)

In an ideal solution I would be able to tag files in Lightroom and manage my end from there.

Jao vdL · Answer

By far the simplest and easiest for your dad to understand way to do this is to use the Photos app and use a shared album instead of folders in the iCloud drive. Photos syncs all this with the cloud and you can arrange in albums to your heart's delight not limited by folders on a drive. Shared albums in Photos work really simple and easy to use. Just drag and drop images into it. Lightroom is going to be way too hard for him to figure it out (that's at least my experience with family members). He can just use photos and just type any info in the caption or keyword fields when you click the (i) button. All this is much easier for normal people to figure out than anything in the Lightroom ecosystem. It also automatically recognizes faces and will suggest people names and do all kind of cute stuff such as creating little remember this reels that people just absolutely love in my experience. Google photos is the equivalent in the android/google ecosystem and it works very similarly except it works in a browser on desktop computers.

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