Just thoughts …

Tag: 2018

  • Lightroom CC (iPhone) working with Lightroom Classic CC

    I’ve been putting off tackling how the two different pieces of software could work together, but having been asked explicitly to have a look at it by a member of the Cardiff U3A Photography Group, and having realised that it might just be a helpful, and easy, way of getting photos on my iPhone into Lightroom Classic (on the desktop), I started to investigate how it could be done.

    Starting point was this video clip from Adobe’s Benjamin Wade who has a series of short videos which are called Lightroom Coffee Break. This one is called ‘Syncing Photos with Lightroom Mobile’ which although it has a confusing title, it does actually describe a way of working for the iOS Lightroom CC app and Lightroom Classic CC.

    Which is what I wanted; it might not actually be what I was asked to investigate, but perhaps I’ll return to that another day.

    Anyway, I followed the instructions on the video. Created a collection in Lightroom Classic that I wanted photos on the iPhone to be sync’d to,

    and then went to my iPhone, saw the Collection had appeared as an album; selected that album and took a photo. It very soon sync’d back to the desktop and appeared in a folder called Imported Photos under my Device name (on my laptop/desktop) – the iPhone – as well as in the Collection above

    I was delighted to see that the GPS information had indeed been copied over with the image and was present in the Metadata. All I needed to do now was to Move the images from the Imported Photos folder on the Device to the correct folder in my Lightroom file store. And that was that! A quite easy way of ensuring that I had good GPS information (from the iPhone) to locate photos taken with the A7r.

    A side product of the workflow is that I can now see a reason for ditching the Camera app, and just using the Lightroom app. All I needed to do there was set my ‘iPhone images’ album to Auto Import from the Camera Roll on the iPhone. For the moment I’ll just use a single Album/Collection as I don’t really want to do mobile editing – I use my laptop for that anyway – so sync’ing albums/collections is not what I really want/need. But I do now have a quick and easy way of getting my iPhone images into Lightroom Classic.

  • I've now had an introduction to the SBOD

    Now I’ve been uber-charitable about Apple and their MacOS, but yesterday and today I was introduced to the Spinning Beachball of Death which froze me out of doing anything on my iMac whilst I trawled the internet (on another machine) trying to find out what could be wrong.
    I’d not left the machine on, in sleep mode, and yet it just crawled through boot and sign-in until it basically gave up the ghost when it got to the Desktop. What could it be?
    Obviously it was probably a hardware problem … wasn’t it? Well a bit of Cmd + R work, running disk utility showed everything was in fine fettle, many re-boots later things seemed to be improving, but not all was right. What could it be? Try logging-in to another account on the same machine I thought. Well I had one, but it wasn’t an Admin account, but it was worth a try. This seemed to be much better so I was now thinking about Corruption of the User Profile and the need to Restore from a Time Machine backup … maybe. But then, out of the blue, all seemed to be well again … until this morning, when the SBOD returned.
    This time I knew it was likely to be something to do with my User Profile, so I setup a new Admin account once I managed to get to the screen that allowed me to do that. Logged out, and then logged into the new account and, as I hoped, the login screamed through. I set up the machine and right at the end I was told that my Paragon NTFS for Mac (which allows me to read Windows files) needed to be updated as it was not optimal for my version of MacOS (High Sierra, 10.13.6). The penny dropped! This software wasn’t installed on my MacBook Pro. This piece of software was interfering with Finder on the iMac in some way to slow everything down. Quickly into System Preferences then, disable the NTFS for Mac driver, and re-boot. All seems to be well. Some hard lessons learnt and a lot of time wasted.
    The lessons learnt?

    1. Have a spare Admin account on your machine so that you can check your user profile
    2. Disable, or Uninstall any software that you’re not using because inevitably it will go out of sync with something else
    3. Make sure that you know how to start your machine in a number of different ways to check for faults – I had to print out a cheat sheet to do this
    4. Make sure you have an up-to-date backup … just in case; I did, so that was my last option, and I’d have been OK … I think!