photos

Many years ago, I decided to migrate my photo library from Apple's now-defunct Aperture to Photos, so I could take advantage of Apple's iCloud Photo Library (don't worry, I still have three full complete local backups, plus a separate cloud backup besides Apple's iCloud originals).

One pain point is RAW support. As camera manufacturers add new models, their proprietary RAW codecs are updated, and software vendors like Apple, Adobe, and Microsoft have to update photo editing tools to work with the new camera models.

I don't envy them this task, but as Photos was Apple's official successor to Aperture (a pale shadow to be sure, but it has its merits as a semi-decent library organizer), they've generally done well supporting new camera models. The compatibility list for macOS Sonoma, iPadOS 17, and iOS 17 is a testament to that effort.

I was recently invited to take some pictures of the campus and interior of St. Michael the Archangel Catholic Church in Shrewsbury, MO (nestled in a neighborhood just outside of the City of St. Louis), and I just finished processing and uploading them to Flickr; see my St. Michael the Archangel photos.

There are so many of these little Catholic churches in St. Louis and around the country, with so much hidden beauty. I always try to find a neat little parish near where I stay in any city I visit; usually these parishes showcase more artwork than even the diocesan cathedrals—though that's not the case in St. Louis!

I recently migrated around ~50,000 photos and videos from Aperture to Photos (see my blog post on the process), and have also in a short amount of time upgraded my personal and work Mac laptops (both from older MacBook Airs to newer MacBook Pros).

On both of my new laptops—which were at least 3x faster than my older Airs—I noticed that Photos started completely fresh in its photo analysis for the 'People' album that shows everyone's faces. And after three weeks of seeing one of my CPUs stick around 100% all day every day (while plugged in), I started getting sick of this.

I would leave the Mac on all night, and check in the morning, and only 20-30 new faces would be recognized.

Some days it seemed it would take forever...

tl;dr: ~600 GB photo library, took ~3 weeks to migrate, some things are awesome (access to all my photos everywhere, on any device), some things less so (faces don't get synced, no loupe, no five-star rating system, no pro-level editing/batch workflows). All-in-all, I wish Apple didn't ditch Aperture... but it's not the end of the world moving to Photos.

There are many, many photographers who were disappointed Apple decided to discontinue Aperture development. Aperture was by far my favorite tool for both organizing and manipulating RAW photos taken with my DSLRs. It was fast, it had tons of great organizational features, and was highly adaptable.

I forgot to post here, after posting to different social networks—when NASA's Juno orbiter was placed in Jupiter's orbit, it just so happened to coincide with my family's Sunday night crêpe tradition (see how to make gluten/dairy/egg-free crepes, or how to make normal crepes).

So what did I do? I used some peanut butter, cream cheese, and nutella to try to depict a tasty food version of Jupiter:

A Jupiter crepe in honor of Juno's mission milestone today

Yesterday I was invited by a friend to photograph the Memorial Mass for Justice Antonin Scalia at the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis. Justice Scalia was a Catholic first and Supreme Court Justice second... may we all live our lives in a way where our faith, family, and morals lead our work and interaction (and not vice-versa)!

I've uploaded all the photos to Flickr: Memorial Mass for Justice Antonin Scalia, and here are a couple of my favorites below (it's hard not to have some majestic images when shooting at the Cathedral!):