burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Congrats on your M1 purchase from a LONG-time Mac and Windows user (since 1985 for Macs, and since Windows 3 on PCs). I just bought an M1 MacBook Air and a 27" LG monitor and a few other goodies to replace my Late 2013 iMac. I love it.

Photos works great — UNTIL you try to find your original files, which it squirrels away in a “package” file in the Pictures folder (Photos Library.photoslibrary). You can open that with the "Show Package Contents" option in the Get Info panel, accessed by right-clicking or control-clicking on the package file.

I prefer the $10/month Adobe Photography Plan. (I use Lightroom CLASSIC and Photoshop 2021, with ACR and Bridge). But if you use Photos, you can add Raw Power and Affinity Photo to extend its capabilities greatly, for $100 or less, total.

Raw Power is a plug-in that can be used as a stand-alone app. Find it in the App Store. It is a raw file converter that uses MacOS' latest updates to decode nearly all raw file formats.

Affinity Photo is a bitmap editor, sort of a "baby Photoshop." Buy it on the Serif website, where (If you scroll ALL the way to the bottom of the Affinity Photo page linked below) you can get a free trial.

https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/photo/

Lemkesoft Graphic Converter 11 is a great tool for batch resizing, renaming, converting file formats, cull editing and sorting, and much more. I have used it since 1993! It is shareware, so you can try it and decide whether to buy it, with no time limits. Buying unlocks features and gets you into the program faster.

https://www.lemkesoft.de/en/image-editing-slideshow-browser-batch-conversion-metadata-and-more-on-your-mac

I also use Fotor (in the App Store), Epson Scan 2 (came with my office scanner), and the Negative Lab Pro plug-in for Lightroom Classic. Negative Lab Pro lets me copy film negatives with a digital camera, which is faster than under $2000 scanners, and arguably better.

https://www.negativelabpro.com

cspear42 Loc: New Mexico

Thank you to all for your recommendations and comments. I have been trying photos for a few days now and I find it quick and easy; however limited. I will look at other programs suggested.

davidrb Loc: Half way there on the 45th Parallel

The manufacturer of your digital camera offers you a better selection for editing your photos. Apple offered then destroyed Aperture, a very good program. Apple is under the idea that THEY, not YOU should decide what you want. Their claim is the Photos is a superior editing program. Your post may offer a different opinion.

Moondoggie Loc: Southern California

I have been using it for a couple of years editing RAW photos. It works well and pretty easy to learn. I’m sure it’s not as powerful as LR or PS, but it’s free and does a decent job. Try it, it comes with your system.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

If the camera manufacturer writes their OWN code, then their free app is a decent place to start, especially for raw file conversion, because no one knows their color science like they do. (Canon and Nikon make good examples of this. Canon DPP is especially good.)

Some of the smaller camera manufacturers have abandoned the software they shipped with their cameras a few years back, and the developers of that software moved on. SilkyPix is a good example... The free version that last worked with Lumix GH4 raw files is totally incompatible with the last few MacOS releases. Their latest version will work, but you have to pay for it.

What became of Apple Aperture are two apps: Apple Photos, and Gentlemen Coders' Raw Power. A part of the team who wrote Aperture went out on their own to write Raw Power. It is the essentially the raw processing engine that was in Aperture. It works as a stand-alone or as a plug-in. It uses Apple's camera profiles and other technologies of the hardware and OS. Apple took bits and pieces of iPhoto and Aperture and re-structured them in a more consumer-oriented Photos. It's more powerful than iPhoto, less versatile than Aperture, and its main strength is its very tight integration with iCloud and Photos on iPads and iPhones. I use it for my iPhone photos. My serious work goes into Lightroom Classic. Occasionally, I'll export originals from Photos to use them in Lightroom Classic and Photoshop.

Hip Coyote

Leave it to Burke for good info. Usually spot on. I agree. I switched to Mac and just used
My LR and PS subscription. And all subscription services. With the exception of Quicken, all was seamless. ‘’Twer me I’d just use the LR and PS and concentrate on that.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Thanks!

Quicken is great on Windows. The Mac version is a POS.

Hopefully, Microsoft will license Windows 11 for ARM, so we can run it on M1 and all forthcoming Apple Silicon Macs. There's a developer preview edition that can run under Parallels Desktop 17 now, but it's not an official release.

wet3843

I’m tired of the snarky comments frequently posted on this website.

There are lots of good comments and photos but I am tired of the negative comments by some Hoggers.

Enough said

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

leftj Loc: Texas

Apple - I love their products, hardware that is, but hate their politics.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

You got that right...

My MacBook Air (8 CPU cores, 8 GPU cores, 16 neural engine cores, 16GB Unified Memory, and 1TB SSD) SMOKES my Late 2013 iMac with 16GB RAM and 2TB SSD. It is probably all I need for the next five to seven years. It is amazing. Reviewer after reviewer on YouTube have sung its praises for the last ten months. Even the base entry level model is quite a capable machine.

I just exported a 195MB 16-bit ProPhoto RGB TIFF file as an 8-bit sRGB JPEG in well under two seconds!

tommystrat Loc: Bigfork, Montana

Agreed! Those who profess to know it all invariably don't...

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

See my other posts here. You need Raw Power from Gentlemen Coders. It is in the App Store. Go read about it.

Also, it is possible to control where your images go from your devices. Use Apple Image Capture to set the application that opens when you connect a particular device.

https://support.apple.com/guide/image-capture/welcome/mac

I download all my iPhone files to specific folders using Image Capture. I copy all other photos to specific folders with drag and drop. Then I import from these folders into Lightroom Classic.

Bushpilot Loc: Minnesota

I'm with you on this one, quite happy with PS and LrC.

Grey Ghost

Have YOU tried it out? I would like to hear your thoughts about it.