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Malthouse Photography
Malthouse Photography
Known Participant
January 25, 2024
Question

Sharing images with someone not in Lightroom ecosystem

  • January 25, 2024
  • 2 replies
  • 2734 views

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.

This topic has been closed for replies.

2 replies

J
Community Expert
Jao vdLCommunity Expert
Community Expert
January 27, 2024

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.

    Malthouse Photography
    Malthouse PhotographyAuthor
    Known Participant
    January 29, 2024

    @Jao vdL if one drags-and-drops a photo into Photos app on Mac does it move in the folder structure on the machine?

     

    The reason I ask is that he has other "non-photo" things in with photos. For example there might be a note detailing thoughts about a particular person or place that is in a photo, or he might have found a website that references somewhere and so has put links to it in a Docs file in the same folder as a photo of that building. What I want to avoid is that he happily drags the photo into Photos so that he can add titles and description but in doing so he removes the photo from the associated document in a folder which is logically about that photo.

    Think for example of a photo of my great grandparents in a folder with their surname and a family tree document and photos of the house that they lived in and notes reminiscing about that couple and/or the location that they lived in.

    KostFan2
    KostFan2
    Known Participant
    February 2, 2024

    100% agree with @Jao vdL that Photos is the way to go—Shared Albums are so easy (and generally a pleasure) to use.

     

    The one thing to be aware of, if you envision using this potentially to construct more of a unified archive, is that Shared Albums can downsize resolution and might change file type. I.e., if your father shared a photo via a shared album, you might get a modified version if you saved it out of Photos back down to disk or imported it into your own personal Photos library.

     

    This is only really an issue if there are large high res files, and my personal experience is that there usually aren't with old family stuff. Still, if that were the case and you wanted access to the full res files (or the accompanying files with additional information you describe), he could share those folders with you on iCloud Drive. You could dig there to find select originals, or he could share specific full res originals via email out of Photos. (Shared Albums creates a modified/downsized copy for the album—it does not modify the original in the owner's Photos library.)

     

    Again, as Jao says, Shared Albums is the tool that he'll be able to easily learn to use and collaborate with, and I'd focus on that as the most important piece. If he can't easily use it, there's obviously no point! It almost assuredly doesn't matter on his end what the format or resolution is—just the ability to easily jointly share the photos/ID people/etc in the same albums is going to be what matters.

     

    Just so you know the restrictions/aren't surprised: 

     

    - You can stick pretty much anything into a shared album, but it will get downsized to a max resolution of 2048 pixels on the long edge, except panoramic photos, which can be up to 5400 pixels wide - more info from Apple here.

     

    - My experience is that it also converts some file formats to jpg. It's pretty flexible on what you can add, per that link, but they might come out as jpgs on the other end. I can't easily find specifics on when/with which formats it does this, and haven't tested extensively. I do know it converts HEICs, for example. On the other hand, it sounds like Apple says it'd preserve large animated GIFs.

     

    - It also isn't guaranteed to keep all of the original metadata (mainly, I think it usually strips location). Sounds like this isn't going to be a factor.

     

    Again, this will not matter for the actual collaboration piece, and may not be an issue with most, or even all, of the files.

     

    But, just wanted to flag all that as stuff to be aware of. It's particularly on my mind because I recently got my parents going on a family photo archive project myself, and we ran into these considerations when they were deciding on software/cloud options for pulling things together. (They went with a Lightroom cloud solution, as my dad already uses it. They are also mostly focused on digitizing prints and are starting from scratch, rather than sharing/unifying existing files from two different places.)


    This community is fantastic. It is great how both @umlautnord  and @Jao vdL  shared a wealth of knowledge.

    Because at 90 the mind can go very quickly, I think “simple” is best and using what he is already comfortable with.  I set up my system for my parents over 5 years ago which they loved.  You can set it up so you have the ability to create the shared albums for them and pre-populate some of them.  The look of joy on their faces when they see your “Gift” is worth the effort.

     

    Regarding the file format issue, when you download a file to your system that you particularly like, you can make a notation, add a flag or a special rating so the next time you visit them you can get a copy of the higher resolution images off their computers onto a memory stick.

     

    Good luck with your project

      Rob_Cullen
      Community Expert
      Rob_CullenCommunity Expert
      Community Expert
      January 26, 2024

      There is an easy  'One-way' method for you to supply photos to your father, but nothing will sync back to Lr-Classic.

      1) Sync selected Collections in LrC

      2) Share a link to these photos

      3) Father can download JPGs from the browser link and edit as he requires.

      SYNC SETUP IN CLASSIC

      (Attached to this post is Instructions for downloading from a Browser link.)

      Regards. My System: Windows-11, Lightroom-Classic 15.1.1, Photoshop 27.3.1, ACR 18.1.1, Lightroom 9.0, Lr-iOS 10.4.0, Bridge 16.0.2 .
        Malthouse Photography
        Malthouse PhotographyAuthor
        Known Participant
        January 27, 2024

        Rob, thanks. I was aware of that route to share with him. I know he could share a link to "photo albums" to me which would allow a similar download and I could import. But as you say nothing that would bring them back in to Lightroom easily - hence asking for suggestions from folk.

        I suspect my "final solution" will be for me to export from LR fully to an iCloud folder which he is given access to, and for him to place his files in a sub-folder for me to import back into my catalog. It's not ideal but I really don't want to confuse him with it and if he can simply work with files and folders he may be comfortable with that.

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