ChrisKet Loc: Orange, CA

Sorry for the long narrative, but wanted to share my journey:

Since this conversation occurred in January, we've been in our national lock-down and I used the time to scrub all the photos on my desktop.

I use a Mac and have historically been using Mac Photos as my storage library; that was before I got into more serious(?) photography. In a photography class at my local community college, I was introduced to Lightroom. I liked the basic storage structure I had developed for Photos (Decade/Year/Event) and was diligent about adding Keywords, Locations, and Face Names. Early in my use of Lightroom, I imported new photos, edited, tagged, then exported .jpg versions backward to Photos - because there I could sync just my best ones to my iPad.

Meanwhile Lightroom Classic progressed as a storage/editing tool, further developed Lightroom Cloud for use on the iPad, gave me other tools like Spark and Portfolio. I migrated to using Lightroom more exclusively and came to the realization I now have two libraries of photos with many, many duplicates between them: Mac's Photos (with all of the scanned images from my parents, and my entire life prior to digital) and Lightroom (with virtually every digital image taken since my first photography class in 2016) for a combined total of 122,937 images.

So, during my "staying safe at home" time, I reviewed every, single image; moved my "keepers" from Photos into Lightroom (the keywords came across, but not the Faces); deleted any duplicates and reduced my overall library count to 41,452. I deleted everything I'd put up into Amazon Photos and kicked off the Backup process this past Tuesday morning; I'm now at 91% and it appears as though it's now uploading my raw files from 2016 through 2019. Maybe it'll be done tomorrow!

I learn by experimenting and hands on efforts, so next I'm going to create a small folder of irrelevant photos and set Amazon to SYNC on just that folder, so I can play around and experience for myself what it will do. (BTW-I do not do any editing/syncing from my iPad; only my Lightroom Classic.)

It's hard for my friends to understand how good this feels! But, I feel like I made good use of my time during this national crisis.

Thanks for your insights, Don; they've helped me navigate this process!

~Chris

P.S.
Along the way, when I would come across a photo that made me smile, I sent it along to friends/family so they could enjoy it, too.