Photography Workflow 2025
A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled upon Photomator and realized that they had recently been acquired by Apple.
After abandoning Photoshop earlier in 2024 for a one-time purchase of Affinity Designer, I had reduced my Adobe subscription to only Lightroom with 1TB of cloud storage. That said, I had been passively looking for a replacement for Lightroom, but the worthy competitors I found were all lacking (or lacked a reasonable) cloud storage option for an active catalog of photos.
Photomator seemed different, though, as it relied on the Apple Photos library and would sync with an existing iCloud storage plan.
With that, my interest was piqued, and I started looking into the app itself to see if it even came close to the functionality of Lightroom. To my surprise, I found it to be a powerful photo editor with what felt like a more modern UI (some parts even lifted directly from Apple Photos).
I signed up for the free trial (7 days, then $29.99/yr) and was happily impressed. When I checked my iCloud storage, though, which is set to 2TB and shared within my family (although I am the biggest user), I realized I was almost out of space — this would never work.
The next day, I woke up and realized that the majority of my iCloud storage was taken up by Apple Photos, and within Apple Photos, I had accumulated over 90,000 photos and thousands of videos. A question appeared in my head — did I need immediate access to all of this?
What if I took the same approach that I did to my Lightroom catalog years before and culled 90,000+ images and videos to just the best? A daunting task itself, but a welcome challenge to further train my eyes.
To be completely honest, though, what took the longest was not the selection, but rather the backup. I decided to create a series of smart filters that would allow me to back up large photo sets by camera type, which often aligned with chronological periods in my life.
For the larger sets (6k–10k of assets), Apple Photos would take hours, and often, there would be a somewhat short list of “errors” that were unable to export. For these, I went one by one within the filtered set, finding each filename and doing a single export for each — that part was not so much fun.
To back up these photos and videos, I went the same route that I do for RAW storage and put them on my Synology NAS, which syncs with Google Cloud Platform’s Archive-class Cloud Storage on a nightly basis. All said and done, this added less than $2/month to my storage bill after backing up around 1TB of images and videos.
Using the smart filters again, I went through each set and added a ❤️ to each “keeper” that would then remove it from the active smart filter and allow me to delete whatever remained.
At the end of this process, I removed almost 80,000 images and videos from my Apple Photos library and freed up almost 1TB of space on iCloud. This included the ~6,100 RAW files I had brought over from Lightroom as well. This meant I had more “extra room” within iCloud than I did on my 1TB Adobe plan, so I felt confident in the headroom it gave me for the coming years.
In the middle of this process, I started wondering if Apple would pull a “Dark Sky” on Photomator and nerf the editor into Apple Photos. I came across this video by Joseph Slinker and was put a bit at ease by his argument that Photomator would become the “Pro” version of Apple Photos, similar to how Logic is for GarageBand and Final Cut Pro is for iMovie. Who knows what will ultimately happen, but the first photo editor I ever used was Aperture, so deep down, my hope is that Photomator is Apple’s new Aperture.
The other issue I ran into that almost stopped me — one that I reached out to the Photomator support team about — was the fact that Photomator could not read Lightroom sidecar files, so every edit I’ve made on over 6,000 photos would be effectively lost.
The Photomator team wrote back to me quickly and explained that no editing software had the same sidecar data. I don’t know why I didn’t realize this before, but it makes complete sense for different software applications that all do roughly the same thing, but in sometimes wildly different ways.
Culling 90,000 photos seemed daunting but not impossible — re-editing 6,000 photos seemed almost impossible.
Again, I slept on this thought and woke up the next day resolute to continue. I saw it less as a burden and more as an opportunity to revisit the images that I love with my eyes of today instead of the past.
So, all said, I canceled my Adobe subscription (and paid a cancellation fee that I was not happy with, but nonetheless, it further convinced me that Adobe had lost their way), and I am now using Photomator 100% and not looking back.
I’m pretty happy that I was able to find a workable solution — not just at one-quarter the cost of the Adobe plan but also one that allowed me to digitally declutter something I had been ignoring for years.
With Photomator in place, I feel like I’ve reached a new level of efficiency in my photo workflow. The same way film photography forced me to slow down and concentrate closely, this workflow will allow me to do the same with image culling and easily maintain a library of “just the best” while also having an inexpensive backup of everything.
Now, whether the RAWs are shot on my Sony or iPhone, I can follow the same backup plan to GCP and then cull within Apple Photos and move to Photomator seamlessly for the photos that I want to edit.
The next step for me is to develop a series of LUTs to use within Photomator while I continue to covet the Leica Q3 43, of course.