Over the years, my postprocessing workflow had been relatively stable: 

  1. Download the photos on my SD card to my computer using Google Picasa.
  2. Create a new library, and load the photos all in my (standalone) Lightroom. 
  3. Cull through the photos, mark the ones I don’t like for deletion, and work on the rest.
  4. Export jpegs to a folder with the format of “YYYY-MM-DD - Event name”.
  5. View the photos on Google Picasa.
  6. (Occasionally) backup the photos on Amazon Prime Photo. 

This had served me well, for the most part, but it had multiple issues:

  1. I also shoot with my iPhone, so I ended up having two libraries that were not consolidated.
  2. I do most of my photography when I travel, so I end up having a ton of photos after a week or two of traveling. Now imagine the life after a trip, all the stuff that I have to do, and in the back of my mind, there is this nagging that I need to go through hundreds of photos, and process them! It’s just a chore at that point, and I usually delay that as much as I can.
  3. After so many days have passed from taking those photo, I don’t have much enthusiasm to postprocess them anyways.
  4. For this reason, it takes days to weeks from the time of shooting to sharing the photos on Instagram and with friends/family.
  5. Standalone Lightroom and Picasa are not supported in Mac OS anymore, so I had to part ways with them anyways.
  6. My backup process had been manual, which means it only happens once in a while.
  7. I am running out of storage on my computer.
  8. I don’t have access to my iPhone photos on my Mac, and to my camera photos on my phone.

Thus, I decided that it’s time to find an alternative, and here it is: I have moved all my postprocessing to iPad, and storage to iCloud. I consolidated both libraries by moving the (most interesting) photos from my Mac to the Photos app, and have it sync to iCloud.

Here is the new workflow:

  1. Everyday, after the shoot, I use a card reader to attach the SD card to my iPad. 
  2. I open the SD card on Lightroom app, and import all photos. 
  3. I then cull through the photos in Lightroom, delete the ones I don’t like, edit the good ones, and export them to Camera Roll.
  4. Done!

Now, all my problems are solved! No more fiddling with downloading, storage, backup, nothing. I have a single library for all my photos, and iCloud will sync the photos across all my devices, backup them, and optimizes the storage on my devices by keeping only a small version of the files on disk. On top of that, I get to review, postprocess and share the photos during my trip, and avoid the post-trip postprocessing blues. 

But you might say wait, iCloud only gives you 5GB of storage for free, so are you paying for storage? And to that I answer, yes, happily, ‘cause it’s worth it! I store all my jpegs on iCloud, and leave the RAW files I processed in Lightroom. The rest of the RAW files stay on my SD card, until I either care to download and backup them, or I just reformat it. I know, this might sounds like a huge no-no, as we photographers should store every single RAW files we shoot, in case we need to go back and re-process them. But during the last 15 years of photography, I have yet to find the need to do that! I look at my processed photos very often, but I have NEVER re-processed a single one of those 100s of GB of RAW files I so religiously have kept. But I’m not throwing out the RAW files I process. They are both on my device, and (occasionally) uploaded to Adobe Cloud.

On the topic of Lightroom and Adobe Cloud, I am still figuring out what’s best. Ricoh GR III has DNG files that can be processed with the free version of Lightroom that doesn’t have Cloud storage (and some other goodies, but for the most part, it’s ok). However, in order to process the RAW files of my Sony A7RII, I need to get the monthly subscription ($4.99/month), which entitles me to 100 GB of cloud storage. So for now, I’m considering subscribing to Lightroom only when I do need to use RAW with my Sony A7RII, which is usually a few times per year (I shoot RAW+JPG all the time, just in case, and only use the jpegs in Lightroom). I tried a few other Lightroom alternatives on iOS, but they all had serious problems, and simply didn’t work out for me. I will keep looking though, since I generally prefer to pay for a proper RAW processor once, instead of paying a monthly subscription.

Of course, this workflow works for me, but it may not work for others, especially for professional photographers who shoot hundreds of photos per day, and may have exorbitant amounts of data. I need to clarify that I believe in keeping a small number of good photos, and discarding the rest. To give you an idea, 15 years of photography, including all my phone photography over the years, I only have around 6,500 photos on my iCloud storage now! So I don’t think I will be needing a lot of storage anyways.

And finally, needless to say, you can replace iCloud and iPad with Google Photos and your choice of Android tablet, and you (probably) get the same experience.