Photography
That came as a bit of a surprise. I spent a few minutes playing with On1 Photo Raw and the first impression was “quite nice”. It felt “light” compared to LR, but since I’ve been using LR for many years now I feel a bit awkward but still. I need to play more with this. Compared to LR, On1 Photo Raw feels more like a cross-plattform app that doesn’t really behave like a macOS app. But it definitely felt more modern and “slicker” than both LR and LR Classic.
Need to play more with it … and watch a few tutorials.
Tomorrow will be an interesting day … no, I’m not talking about the Apple event thingy (it will be a couple of years before I’ll upgrade my iPhone 11). The interesting thing will be to see if Panasonic is going to release the Lumix G9 II - and what the price will be.
One of the things I appreciate with the GR IIIx is that the RAW-files are more or less exactly the colors I see. They are so much closer to my reality than any other camera I’ve tried.
Sigh, I’ve started to see how people are posting AI generated photos claiming they are real photos. 🤦🏻♂️
I would be very interested in an updated version of the Lumix GM5.
Considering moving away from Smugmug
A few months ago I discovered that Smugmug have increased the subscription price significantly
| Year | Subscription |
|---|---|
| 2016 | $75 |
| 2017-2024 | $89.95 (I payed for three years in 2021) |
I remember thinking that $90/year was a lot of money, but since I liked SmugMug I decided to renew. However, the current price for my plan is $138 … a 53% increase compared to the last time I renewed. I also noted that they had removed the cheapest plan, and I’m now on the cheapest plan.
I’m starting to think that $138 is a bit too much money to spend each year for a gallery site. I’m not selling any photos so I don’t make any money that could help offset the cost. These $138 are coming from my “have fun” account … an additional 10 years means $1380 assuming no further price increases, and I can have a lot of fun that amount of money.
My main use for my SmugMug site have been to show off photos from various events, and to let people download photos. I’m very satisfied with how Lightroom and SmugMug integrates with each other, and the site looks good. So I have no complaints regarding the functionality of SmugMug. In other words, my only hesitation is about the price, can I really justify spending $138/year to have somewhere to upload my photos. I really don’t know, right now I’m leaning towards switching to something else.
The good thing is that I’ve payed for another year so I have time to investigate what my alternatives are before making a decision. I’m currently looking at Piwigo and jAlbum which are very different types of software. Piwigo is similar to SmugMug (although not as nice) in that it’s a dynamic web site where you upload you photos and manage them using the site. jAlbum is desktop application where you generate a static web site and then upload it to your server. Piwigo is free, while jAlbum will cost you some money (but you don’t need to upgrade each year). Piwigo and jAlbum assumes that you have a web site where you can upload your site (both have alternatives where they host your site, but I’m looking for the possibility to self-host), I already have this web site space so this is no extra cost for me.
I really don’t know what to do … but I have about 9 months to decide (need a couple of months to actually move my photos if I decide to move).
There is of course an additional alternative, sell enough photos so I could pay for SmugMug with that money … which is a very unlikely alternative 😁.
The Photowalk podcast
I haven’t written about The Photowalk podcast for a while … so it’s time to promote it again.
Are you interested in photography? Are you mostly interested in the photos, the stories behind the photos, the photographers? Then I really recommend that head over to The Photowalk web site and listen to a few episodes. I can’t promise that you will like the show, but I think the chances are high, very high.
The show content can be divided into two parts: The Interviews and The Letters. The letters are written by the listeners of the show, and can range from mundane observations of the world, to moving descriptions of life changing events. The other part are interviews with various interesting photographers, the interviews are expertly done by the show host Neale James. I can’t really explain how he does the interviews, but he always manage to bring out interesting stories from the interviewees.
Of all the available photo related podcats, this is the one I find most interesting. Highly recommended.
The Photowalk podcast
I haven’t written about The Photowalk podcast for a while … so it’s time to promote it again.
Are you interested in photography? Are you mostly interested in the photos, the stories behind the photos, the photographers? Then I really recommend that head over to The Photowalk web site and listen to a few episodes. I can’t promise that you will like the show, but I think the chances are high, very high.
The show content can be divided into two parts: The Interviews and The Letters. The letters are written by the listeners of the show, and can range from mundane observations of the world, to moving descriptions of life changing events. The other part are interviews with various interesting photographers, the interviews are expertly done by the show host Neale James. I can’t really explain how he does the interviews, but he always manage to bring out interesting stories from the interviewees.
Of all the available photo related podcats, this is the one I find most interesting. Highly recommended.
Lightroom sync — I give up
I’ve found it to be very convenient to edit photos on my iPad, it’s not where I edit 100+ photos but if I got less than 50, then I really like editing in Lightroom Mobile. My main photo app is Lightroom Classic, I’m not enthusiastic about it, but I’m used to it and knows how to edit my photos. With the promise that I can sync photos I’ve imported and edited in LR Mobile to LR Classic, it seems like a no-brainer to use this combo.
Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. The syncing between LR Mobile and Classic is 100% unreliable! Unreliable in the sense that there is always one or more photos that LR Classic tries to sync, but it never finishes. This mean that I don’t know if the photo has been copied from “LR Cloud” to my desktop, sometimes it has, and sometimes it hasn’t.
Searching for a solution, a common comment is “Let it be, it will sort itself out eventually”, my experience is that it doesn’t happen. I’ve been waiting for weeks, but Classic is still waiting for the same photo to finish syncing. Numerous times I’ve tried starting from scratch, deleting everything in “LR Cloud”, then start to import new photos on my iPad and usually in a day or two I have a photo that doesn’t finish syncing.
Yesterday, something happened that made me decide to stop trying. I had taken two photos on my phone that I needed on my desktop, the photos had synced on my iPad and everything looked OK. However, Classic refused to download them and instead was trying to finish a sync of another photo. I tried everything I could come up with to get Classic “un-stuck”, but I couldn’t figure something that worked. Instead, I exported the RAW file to Photos, let it sync to my Mac (less than a minute), exported it from Photos to my desktop and imported it into Classic where I could do what I needed to do (printing).
This was the final straw and I decided that from now on, I’ll be importing photos into Photos on my iPad, do my editing in Darkroom and later archive the photos in Classic using PhotoSync. This means that my editing will disappear, and it’s a bit cumbersome. But, according to my experience, it’s 100% rock solid. I will of course test LR Mobile once in a while to see if the syncing have improved (it hasn’t in several years, so I’m not holding my breath).
I’m amazed the Adobe hasn’t managed to get this to work, given that they have had such a long time to fix it.