Sharing images with someone not in Lightroom ecosystem

[Malthouse Photography]

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.

[Rob_Cullen]

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.)

[Malthouse Photography]

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.

[Jao vdL]

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]

@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.

[Jao vdL]

If you drag an image into photos it imports it into is own library by copying the photo. It won't remove it from where it was.

[Malthouse Photography]

Thanks. Useful to know.

[umlautnord]

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.)

[KostFan2]

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

[Malthouse Photography]

Thanks, @Jao vdL , @Rob_Cullen , @umlautnord , @KostFan2  that's all helpful stuff. The information about changing of file sizes and types is particularly useful as I reckon Dad has some big scans in there, knowing him.

The sharing of an iCloud drive may prove a hiccup as I've got a small (default) drive size and he paid for a big one. I bet he can share but I won't be able to see it all. Time will tell. We shall work a way around that one.

The share of a photo-album however will get us part way through what we need to do and I'll just have to visit him for the rest of it. Talking of which... must go... am about to go and see my parents to sort out their email setup as our host has changed things! 😉 

[umlautnord]

Best of luck! It can be a really rewarding project—it's good time together, you get to see some new pictures, and all the stories they inevitably produce. That slows it down from an "organizing" point of view, but can be just as valuable IMO.

On the iCloud drive quota: I am ~95% sure, but don't quote me on this, that a folder/document shared from his iCloud Drive should not count towards your own smaller storage limit until you actually copy something onto your own iCloud drive. I.e. it only counts towards the "owner's" quota. And it obviously won't ding you at all if you just copy it directly to your hard disk from the shared drive.  So, he could share 200GB of files with you, and it's no immediate problem if you only have the 5GB free plan. Or, as it sounds like you're nearby, @KostFan2 's memory stick plan is also an excellent (and maybe easier) one.

Again, best of luck, and really, have fun with it.

[Malthouse Photography]

Thank you all.

Today I had to visit my Dad to adjust his email settings and we had the chance to play and see what he can get his head around.
What we ended up doing was simply sharing his iCloud Drive folder with the images in and showing him how I could add a comment to an image, on his machine.

That bit I shall write up some notes for him to work with.

Coming back home I fired up my Mac (I've not checked on my PC yet) and went to my iCloud Drive to look at it. This is an image where he'd done a screen grab of a map to show where a relative was born and we annotated it simply.

I can read that description quite readily as you can see.

I can see the description readily if I go into markup the image. It would be good if I could also see that description without going in to that mode. Get Info only shows the start of the description in the IPTC Artwork Content Description field.

Quickly scanning down images and reading the descriptions would be a bonus.

If I have to pay for iCloud Drive size to match his use so that I can follow the project then I'll do that because it will be worth it!

Any suggestions for me more readily reading the descriptions that he adds (or indeed him reading them without going in to edit mode all the time) would be marvellous.

[KostFan2]

@Malthouse Photography The biggest disappointment you may experience is regarding facial recognition.  Your dad can spend time identifying and having the Apple algorithm identify people in the pictures.  This is a great feature.  However, as of 2 years ago, that information could NOT be shared with other people. This included shared albums.  In other words, I do not believe you will be able to see the people’s names your dad has added.  I hope that Adobe has fixed this limitation. Therefore, please let me know if you can see the names.

Thank you

[Malthouse Photography]

@KostFan2 as we currently have it that's not an issue be cause we're now sharing via iCloud Drive not via Photos. But his old system (iMac Retina 5k, 27" Late 2015) is only capable of Monterey so he's not using newer stuff either (my Mac is newer but was only purchased second-hand to support him remotely).

I can't therefore tell you if names are visible via the Photos route.

He's labelling people only (at the moment) by file name but he'll shortly be doing it by adding comments to the images.

And I can see he's been working on it since yesterday already. I'm on my PC and can see a whole raft of folders that weren't there yesterday as he starts to sort them.

[umlautnord]

@Malthouse Photography Hm. I've never used that Description field in Markup in Preview before, nor am I familiar with others using it. And "Artwork Content Description" doesn't seem like a commonly used field... it almost seems like Apple is dumping it in there just so it lives in the metadata somewhere/they needed somewhere to put it.

For example, it's not one of the metadata fields that pulls in if you "get info" on the file in Finder. That does show a bunch of fields, including Title/Caption/Keywords and a number of EXIF exposure/camera stuff. It's not editable, however. (There is also a "comment" field in Finder but I don't believe that even gets written to an image-associated metadata field; I think that's something OS-associated, so I wouldn't touch that.)

That'd be a benefit of using Photos - it'll actually be writing to standard metadata fields.

I don't think Preview is really meant/designed to do this kind of thing for image files. I believe all that Preview annotation functionality (and honestly, Preview in general) is generally more aimed for PDFs, which natively support more of that type of annotation across viewers/readers.

So, I'd generally hesitate about using Preview description, annotation, and comment tools on images for this project—not just because it's not writing to/editing standard metadata from that description dialog, but because other on-image annotations will end up either burned in or completely ignored by any other software that opens them. That includes importing into Photos—it may preserve that metadata field somewhere in the original file itself, but you can't read it using Photos built-in tools, and any text annotations on the images will just be flattened and burned in. Not sure what will happen with comment boxes, but they either wouldn't be useful or would be discarded completely. I'm sure Lightroom has similar issues with annotation tools burning in, though it'd at least be able to dig up that metadata field Preview is writing to.

I know Photos doesn't allow for individual image-area tagging like Preview might appear to ("add comment box to X face on photo or area on map"), or like you may be used to with defining face areas in Lightroom Classic. You'd need to just use the description/caption field to say "third from left is X." And it'd be harder to handle maps—there, burning in an annotated edit might not be so bad, admittedly. But, I think you get my point.

Standard Shared Albums should be compatible on Photos in Monterey, if that's your concern with OS compatibility. The Shared Library feature requires the latest everything, but, that's not a good route for a number of reasons.

If Photos itself seemed like too much to tackle/he's used to Finder and Preview... I'm trying to think of something that'd be more Finder-based but have more standard metadata editing capability, and I'm coming up with a blank.

The only other thing I can think of is Bridge, but I honestly find that even a less intuitive tool to use than either desktop Lightroom experience. 

It might be an option on your end to use Bridge to review images if he were just using that description field in Preview plus filenames and folder organization. I'm not sure if you could get Bridge to show you this random metadata field Apple's dumping that description field into—I haven't used it for metadata viewing/editing much. But, even if you could, you'd still want to generally have him away from any on-image annotation in Preview. (Again, possible exception of drawing on maps.)

[umlautnord]

Quick addition: Apple's info page on Preview annotations/markup: https://support.apple.com/guide/preview/annotate-an-image-prvw1501/mac

"Note: If you annotate an image file, you can’t edit, move, or delete the annotations after you save the image. If you think you’ll need to change annotations later, you can convert the image file to a PDF file, then add annotations to the PDF."