A simple, desperate workflow I can’t recommend.

I’m not a “photographer” as much as a person with cameras that’s fastidious and prone to overthinking. This is where I’m at managing photos in the actual year 2025.

Backstory

In the days of Aperture, I had no complaints.

I imported files from a camera, like the Canon Digital Rebel that replaced my 35mm Rebel 2000, and they went into Aperture’s library. I pruned out the many mistakes, made my edits, and sometimes pushed a few to Flickr.

Then Aperture went away and nothing ever quite replaced it.

Lightroom worked well, but Adobe seemed increasingly hell-bent on moving to subscriptions. (I’m done being irritated with subscriptions, but wary relying on them with words and memories I’ll still want someday when I’m ancient with an unknown income.)

Synology Photos never stopped feeling clunky.

Luminar was okay, but full of upsells and increasingly more excited about its AI features than I was.

ON1 was pretty good.

Photomator was nearly perfect, only missing video previews. I bought a lifetime license a few weeks before it was acquired by Apple, and I assume that if Photomator manages to stick around my precious folder support will vanish.

I haven’t yet mentioned my self-imposed complications:

1. Each application has had its own way of managing source files and metadata, and I’m tired of losing information and hierarchy so I insist on managing my own folders and not trusting big library files anymore.
2. The collection has grown to a point that it’s now on external storage. A fast USB4 NVMe enclosure has taken some pain out of that.
3. I’ve merged my iPhone and camera media into one library, where memories increasingly include videos in addition to photos.

I’m pretty sure a lot of you use Apple Photos because it’s easy. There are lots of nice apps that can work with your Photos library.

Many others use Google Photos or Dropbox because you can get plenty of storage and easy sync and automatic backup.

But really I don’t know what most of you are doing.

I have a spouse, no kids, and one dog. Not a ton of subjects, or a life packed with far-flung travels or “interestingness”—but I like bothering with a physical camera sometimes because the images are better and it forces me to look at everything more carefully instead of reactively capturing moments.

Ever since this dog entered our lives my photo volume has hockeysticked with photos of this creature—often doing adorable things like breathing, sleeping, or looking at me with an empty expression. A lot of you are raising human children, so I can only assume your media pile is vastly greater than mine given the cute and momentous things they do.

How anyone manages photos remains a great mystery, is what I’m saying.

Ingredients

Cameras:

• iPhone 14 Pro photos and video, kept in the usual camera roll
• Panasonic GH5 I use for video projects
• new Fuji X100VI that replaced my old Digital Rebel T2i in a form factor closer to the DMC-LX3 I miss

Storage:

• 2TB NVMe stick in a fast USB4 enclosure that’s always connected to my Mac Studio and backed up with Arq

Software:

• Image Capture (macOS utility)
• ExifRenamer
• ditto
• Photomator

Recipe

1. Go do a thing and take photos and/or video.
2. Use Image Capture to transfer new media from the iPhone (cable), X100VI (cable), or GH5 (SD card) to the ~/Downloads directory.
3. Drop those files onto ExifRenamer, which is configured to write a {year}/{month}/{day} structure in a temporary _sorted directory.
4. Use ditto to merge _sorted into the existing library: ditto /Volumes/Example/_sorted /Volumes/Example/Library
5. Confirm joy, then manually delete _sorted pile.

Then I can edit in Photomator, which is great for viewing and working with photos quickly. I can flag and delete cruft, rate the better specimens, crop and fine tune, and sometimes export for sharing or posting to Mastodon or whatever it is I do.

I pretty much forget about videos until I poke around in Finder and wonder if Photomator will ever add video preview support. (I don’t need to be able to edit videos there, I just want to see that they exist—ON1 had this worked out.)

Meh

ExifRenamer is great, and this is a good enough workflow to merge media from various devices into one library where I have control over its structure, how it’s backed up, and whatever it costs to maintain.

It also feels absurd. I keep flirting with the idea of dropping everything into Photos and letting it manage the library like Aperture used to, and worrying obligatory iCloud subscription bumps if and when they’re a problem.

Can I trust Photos and its library, though? I don’t want to get hurt again geotagging and writing captions and tagging people only to have those details vanish in a few years when I decide to change software.

How do you manage your photos, dear reader? What do you shoot, and what with? How do you edit? How do you back up? How long have you been using that system, and are you happy with it?