The issue – a bloated Apple Photos on my iPhone; the Apple Photos Albums on my iPhone don’t match up with my LrC Collections. Like many of you I suspect, I find it difficult to find images on my phone, and I haven’t set up Albums that help me to find them!! So … I want to clear my iPhone of images I don’t want, or have already been copied into LrC (and probably edited anyway). I want to use my phone essentially as a camera, but with the added benefit of a historic archive of “my best shots”, or “a portfolio”, or “where we went on our holiday”, or “family and friends” etc.
So … I asked Perplexity Pro (with Claude Opus as the model) to provide me with a workflow, and then a Plugin for future use.
However, I found it impossible to transfer all the images from my phone to the external SSD I wanted to use as the transfer point into LrC. The internal SSD on my MacMini was just unable to handle the bulk of data being thrown at it to effect the transfer – insufficient SDD space. Silly me! It succeeded when I did a direct transfer from Apple Photos to the external SSD on the MacMini – effectively a cloud to disk transfer.
That got me thinking – what was the main SSD gobbler? I knew about the System Data issue (Albert and Marilyn’s experience) and so that was somewhere to start with, and I brought down the space used by that; however the main storage issue was in Applications, and that led to the discovery of just how much space was being used by Topaz. A quick use of Perplexity revealed that I could actually place these apps on an external SSD, which is where they now are – located on the SSD in the dock that sits under my MacMini; and so far they seem to be working OK with LrC. This has released almost 100Gb of space on the MacMini internal SSD. Success!!!!!
Now to get on with the task – just reached the end of Phase 2 of 5 phases (steps) suggested by Perplexity; glad the weather’s changed this week which allows me a reasonable excuse to sit upstairs on my computer
Cracking on with my LrC <-> Apple Photos “project”. I’ve just installed a Plugin (LR Photos) that will transfer a Published Collection in LrC to Apple Photos (that will then appear in my Photos app on the iPhone/iPad) and which will then be an Album in Apple Photos. If I edit an image in LrC subsequently, the plugin can update the image on Apple Photos (iPhone/iPad), but I have to Delete the Album manually.
Next step … the “scary” deletion of my Apple Photos, so that I can start creating real Albums, and clearing out the dross that has collected there. I (yesterday) completed the integration of all the transferred images into my LrC catalog – it will still need some further weeding; but that’s for another day.
[As of today (20 June), this project has stalled due to a need to revisit the issue of Duplicates, and the strange appearance of Virtual Copies which don’t seem to have any edits attached to them – another post will follow on that one.]
So what if you want to do something similar with Google Photos? Unfortunately there’s not a simple plugin that does the same thing. However there is a workaround that does the upload relatively simply – here it is …
On your hard disk create a Folder, perhaps call it ‘Google Photos Upload’; then in LrC in the Library > Publish Services module create a service that allows you to create Publish Collections to send images to that Folder. Then go to Google Photos and create a Backup and Sync service to “watch” that folder and when a change occurs, copy the images to your Google Photos in the cloud (which will also then be viewable on your phone).
PS The Featured Image above has nothing to do with the content of this post, I just wanted to fill the space with something!!