Apple's photography workflow

BitDepth #1468

UNTIL I'd committed to an all Apple workflow for my smartphone photos, how photos got managed under iOS was something of a mystery to me.

It's been just shy of three decades since I switched to digital photography using MacOS, and I'd only used an early iPhone before switching to Android.

So I stayed with the desktop and folders metaphor for moving, managing and producing images.

There wasn't much need to explore the arcana of Apple's Photos app on the desktop beyond ordering the occasional print or booklet, so I managed to miss the more confusing twists and turns of the evolving image-management system.

Adobe's enthusiasm to alienate its most committed users and a new iPhone provided prompts to understand how pictures get managed in Apple's workflow.

Take a photo with an iPhone or iPad and if you have iCloud sharing enabled on all your devices, the image gets synchronised to all available devices. A photo added on a Mac laptop or desktop, for instance, doesn't go anywhere until you explicitly place it in an album designated for sharing across multiple devices.

This befuddled me for weeks, because it seemed that anything I put into the database should be available to me on any other instance of the database, but no, that's just not how it works.

For a long time, there were no alternative tools for accessing the Photos database either.

Photos, the app that replaced iPhoto, is actually quite a capable image editor, adding some of the powerful image-editing tools left behind after Apple abandoned its Lightroom rival Aperture.

While it is unquestionably the authoritative tool for managing photos in the database, it's missing several tools that a professional photographer would expect.

Over the last year or so, though, Apple appears to have made access to the database more openly available, and several apps are now available that make a pro workflow and deeper interactions with the iPhone's raw captures possible.

Some proved to be non-starters. Photos Workbench from Houdah software, authors of the excellent Houdah Spot, is an attempt to bring rating and image management tools to bear on the Photos database. But its tools are deficient, don't align with professional practice and the desktop only app is slow.

On1 brought a capable version of its parametric image editor to iOS, but while it can read the Photos database, it only imports from and exports to it.

Radiant, which offers useful tools for image editing, seemed like a good Photos replacement. It's available in a subscription model, but you can own the app for US$50, which was costly for what it offered.

Pixelmator, creators of an excellent image editor for MacOS, introduced Photomator, an answer to the Lightroom-Photoshop synchronicity on the desktop, an alternative to Photos and a replacement for its abandoned version of Pixelmator for iOS.

It's expensive, at US$120 for an outright purchase (subscription versions are also offered), but you can try it for a week for free.

Photomator brings many photo-editing tools from Pixelmator Pro to all Apple's mobile devices. Buy it once and you can use it everywhere.

I use Pixelmator Pro quite a bit, and Photomator is an elegant merging of the concept of Photos with the power of a dedicated image editor.

Soon after Photomator's debut, Gentlemen Coders, creators of the editing app RAW Power, brought those tools to its own Photos replacement, Nitro.

For now, Nitro (US$100) is the competitive king. It's the closest anyone has come to delivering a full parametric image editor on iOS, with image-editing tools that surpass what's available in Photos and excellent tagging tools that make culling workable within the database.

Some of these problems aren't likely ever to be solved, given Apple's attachment to private APIs, but there is a notable loosening of restrictions on a critical database that was once untouchable. That's a good thing for iPhone photographers generally and anyone who wants to do more with the Photos app.

Mark Lyndersay is the editor of technewstt.com. An expanded version of this column can be found there.