I'm a long time PM5 user who's delayed giving up Aperture for way too long because I could never decide what to replace it with. Which means I've been working on an ancient laptop that can't be updated, and editing with the equally ancient Photoshop 5.5. I finally decided to bite the bullet, buy a new MacBook Pro, and just move on.
Yesterday I installed the trial version of PM6. Now that I've been messing around with it, I'm wondering whether I should be looking at PM6+ instead. And if so, whether it's possible to switch to the PM6+ trial version. I just really need some guidance here.
My Aperture replacement plan was:
- Continue using PM for ingesting, culling, and keywording
- Affinity Photo 2 in lieu of Photoshop for editing
- I don't want to use Lightroom
- Apple's Photos app for browsing my library (this is where I'm doubting my plan)
I have about 30,000 referenced photos in my old Aperture Library, all obsessively keyworded via PM5 (the IPTC template functionality is awesome). I was thinking I could create a separate library in Apple's Photos app, organized with folders/albums the way I did in Aperture—so I could choose to (A) browse ALL the photos from the top "Library" level, or (B) drill down into my folder/album structure, or (C) filter everything by keyword. I don't actually know if this will even work. Before I spend time trying to figure that out, I think I need to ask a few questions.
1.
Keyword Filtering. My photos are organized on a hard drive into a folder/subfolder structure based on the year/month, all in a top level folder called "Images." There are about 15 "Year" folders, each with 12 "Month" subfolders. In PM5 (for Mac), I can apply keyword filters to all the photos in the entire nested structure at once. So if I wanted to see all my photos associated with the keyword "Berries," for example, I could filter for that, and all the "Berry" images would appear in the window, irrespective of which Year/Month folder each individual image is actually stored in. It appears PM6 no longer has this functionality, is that correct?
2.
Importing to Photos. If I keyword photos via PM6, is it possible to import them into my Photos library with the keywords? If that can be done, it would solve the keyword filtering issue described in the previous question. I'm guessing this is probably NOT possible, though, which brings me to....
3.
Should I be looking at PM6+ instead? I've never been 100% clear on what we mean by the term "catalog," and always assumed it was something only professional photographers would need (I'm just an artist who takes tons of reference photos). Now I'm starting to think maybe a "catalog" is essentially the same functionality I always relied on Aperture for—and why I was so reluctant to move on from it. If that's the case, then I'm pretty sure PM6+ is exactly the solution I'm looking for. In which case, could I please switch my trial over to it instead?
4.
Is There Some Other Option I'm Missing? It might be possible to use Adobe Bridge to supply the browsing and filtering functionality, although ugh... Adobe drives me crazy. So that's basically a non-starter for me. But perhaps you have other suggestions? Only asking because I'm thorough. If the answer is that PM6+ does what I'm looking for, then I'm happy with that answer.
I appreciate your help with this. Thank you so much.
