Lightroom will auto stack images taken within a specified time period making it easy to find groups of HDR bracket shots
70k file catalog and you have got to be kidding me if you have a personally developed system that is as robust as Adobe’s Watch some videos on how to set it up and you will find it makes a lot of sense
Get the PhotoPills app. Great for planning shots plus a number of other photo related calculations.
Epson v600, SilverFast Software, Scan at 3200 resolution
Crazy Americans! Just tell them its an automatic firearm. Problem solved.
One thing to consider is how long it would take to recover your files from your cloud service. Backblaze provides a recovery service where they will provide you a copy of your files on a hard drive that would be much faster to restore especially if you have terabytes of images.
The texture slider issue is separate from the Big Sur OS. I had Catalina running a month ago on a 2016 iMac and the same slider issue started when Lightroom was updated to 10.1.1. I spent an hour on the phone with Adobe support and messed around with some of the preferences and it improved. Adobe recommended that I update to Big Sur and I did. Seems to be working OK now.
One point that nobody has mentioned for consideration before this person tries to consolidate 40,000 photo files. What software are they using now to process and edit the images? If it is non-destructive, they are going to have to make some big decisions on how to migrate their catalog file information to a new software system. Example, if they have been using Apple Photos and want to move to Lightroom for its superior file management features, how will they ensure their edits follow the files when transferring?
Aperture priority, auto bracket +-2, auto ISO, post process exposures. Manual is only useful if on a tripod.
Just a comment here in cloud backup choice. Lots of reputable large providers out there such as Apple, Amazon, Google etc. There are other medium size providers of the service such as Backblaze that I use for a reasonable fee of about $50 per year for unlimited storage (I have 3+Tb at present).
The thing that sold me was the recovery service they provide. For a refundable deposit, they will provide you with a copy of your files via the mail on an external hard drive which would do the restore on your new drive at several orders of magnitude less time. It took me 21 days to upload my files over the internet when I first started using the service. If you are using an internet based recovery, consider how long it would take to restore your files.
I have an iMac and back up the computer drive with Time Machine on an external drive. My media files are stored on two synchronized external drives. Backblaze provides a backup of the media files. Therefore I have two copies at home and one external.
I dumped Aperture about a year after Apple discontinued development. (About six years ago). No use riding on the back of an Albatros. One of the strong points of Aperture was its catalog management and nondestructive editing especially if you shoot RAW.
At the time I made the transition to Adobe, there was a conversion utility that grabbed your Aperture library and imported it into Lightroom along with a bit of the file metadata but not your edits. So you populated Lightroom with unedited RAW files.
I ended up with about 20000 images requiring re-edit that now with COVID lockdown, I am able to get at.
Take this into consideration if you use RAW. If you do and are happy with all of the work you have put into your edits in Aperture, export and save high quality jpg versions for inclusion to whatever new program you are transitioning to. These would be your final keepers unless you want to go through the RAW Edit process again in your new software. Keep your original RAW files in case you ever want to improve the edit. Storage is cheap and so is the subscription to Adobe if you are using any kind of decent photography gear and want to keep up with ever improving technology