What's the best way to switch from Lightroom to Photos on a Mac?

October 2, 2021 7:45 AM

I've been using Adobe Lightroom, on a Mac, for years but don't feel I get my money's worth, given my only occasional photography. I'm thinking of avoiding the monthly cost by moving my 15,000 photos to the Mac's Photos app. I haven't found much advice about how best to do it and wonder what problems I might overlook.

When I've googled, there's a bunch of advice about moving the other way, from Photos to Lightroom, but I've only found this Reddit thread about going from Lightroom to Photos. My current plan is this:

1. Make a copy on an external drive of the folders ~/Pictures/Lightroom Library/ (containing the original photos) and ~/Pictures/Lightroom/ (containing other files the app uses) in case I ever need them again.
2. Work through all my photos in Lightroom and then one of:
   • If it hasn't been edited, use "Show in Finder" to get the original image file and import that into Photos
   • Or, if it has been edited, export a good quality JPG, which will include the edits, and import that into Photos. Maybe also import the original photo.
3. Delete the Lightroom data folders, and the app, and Photoshop, and cancel my monthly payment!

This will be slow but, from trying a few photos, it keeps all the keywords, location, and other Exif data. I've only taken a handful of RAW photos so it's mostly JPGs. I'm not that bothered that I'll have "baked in" all the edits into JPGs; I'll keep the originals for any I think I might want to revisit. I don't use any of Lightroom's "cloud" features and don't plan on using iCloud with Photos either.

I like using Photos – it seems friendlier and more pleasant than Lightroom and plenty powerful enough for me. On the rare occasions I need more detailed editing I can open a photo in Acorn or some other inexpensive image editor. I'll occasionally miss some of Lightroom's lens correction tools but I think that's about it.

Does this sound like a reasonable (if tedious) process? Anything important I've forgotten? Anything I might miss from Lightroom that I might have overlooked?

posted by fabius to Technology (3 answers total)

Those steps all seem correct. Although I would be more inclined to export your edited photos as TIFFs, rather than JPEGs, just to get better quality (unless you're short on hard drive space).

Since you're not really using it much, I doubt there's anything you'll really miss, other than a much greater level of control over color correction. I think Pixelmator uses Apple's lens correction tools, and it's a pretty great (and fast) photo editor, so if acorn doesn't do what you need, I'd suggest looking into that and Affinity Photo.
posted by jonathanhughes at 9:31 AM on October 2, 2021

You should be prepared to peg your processors/graphics card for hours, possibly days, as photos churns through all the facial recognition, etc that it wants to do on those 15,000 photos.
posted by rockindata at 10:47 AM on October 2, 2021

If you use Lightroom's ratings, labels or collections, know that information might not easily transfer. Possibly because those attributes are not part of industry standard metadata. The solution is to add keywords corresponding to those attributes.

If you enable iCloud Photos, then you may need to buy more iCloud storage space.
posted by conrad53 at 2:06 PM on October 4, 2021