Hello: I am considering taking advantage of tomorrows sale of PM5 and must say that I am pleasantly surprised that the 15% discount is also applied to the upgrade.
my situation is that I have five Mac devices in the house. I have a 11" macbook air attached to a 27" Mac Monitor a 15" retina laptop that I use in a corner of the house and 17" Macbook pro that is set up as a Server and two 13 MacBook pros, one of which my girlfriend uses and one for my daughter. Nice to have a simple life!
I'm the only one that edits photos and the challenge has been to find a way to have a centralized photo repository, while serving both my needs as well as encouraging theirs use of all of this. They only want to be able to look at these photos, for enjoyment, to share with their friends and to tell me which ones to edit. I'm the only one who administers this mess and edits the photos. Its been a bear to set all of this up!
I use PM now only to ingest photos because of the invaluable flexibility of program in naming, keywording and how easy it is to move folders worth of photos intelligently. Then I use Capture One to edit select photos and lastly move then jpg's into Aperture. Aperture was chosen over Lightroom for the fact that at that point my girlfriend and daughter can view the files and use apertures best of class organizational methodologies (and it is easy for both to use - and perhaps do a bit more editing to their taste within the program) and especially Apertures ability to share. There is no choice about that ... they both use the built in sharing ability of the Mac with dozens of others and only iPhoto or Aperture works for them. So that is the setup, so far.
The difficulty has been that Aperture is not meant to be but for local use. Under no circumstances is it tolerable to have three libraries. It's imperative that we all have access to the same photos in the same way. I've gotten around that limitation by the use of the server. It isn't perfect yet but it works well enough. Now for my questions.
First of all licensing. If I upgrade, I believe I will need more than one license for four machines. Is that correct? The licensing as far as I know states that up to three machines can be used. Does that mean I need to buy one upgrade as well as a full license? Sounds fair ... but I just want to check ahead of time. The Aperture license is for all the computers i the house, and so I guess I don't need PM for their machines ... but that way they have access only to the selected 10% or so, that makes it into Aperture. It would be nice to set up a system where they use PM as well to ingest their own files and select their own photos for editing. In such a setup ... where three people are using PM, but all under the same roof ... what are the licensing requirements? Finnaly ... I've been holding off the purchase of 5 ... mostly because of the upcoming network enabled catalogue product in development. That seems like something fabulous for my situation! I wonder if the catalogue will be a whole standalone licensing requirement, completely independent of the v5 purchase ... or if it is an add-on, where it makes sense to spend money on v5 in the meanwhile ... or not? I hope that question makes sense.
Then, in the long shot case that someone has a setup similar or identical to mine - any ideas of how to set up PM for the best likelihood of all the matadata surviving intact in a trip through PM to C1 to aperture? I'd love to hear some best practice advice. The Aperture files are referenced btw ... so the use of PM at any point in the workflow should still be good.
I absolutely love how PM handles with such elegance the keywords and the structured keywords are soooo marvelous to have. It makes everyone else's approach crude imho. PM speed is great, especially when used right after dealing with other programs with machines a few years old (not going to mention Aperture by name here
) I hope that sometime soon that there could perhaps be more attention to Mac like sharing in PM. Non professionals don't want to bother. I know my daughter will NOT use something if she can't click and have the photo sent immediately and transparently to iChat, Facebook, or Instagram. From my point of view I'd love to make it easy enough for her to ftp photos ... but to send them to her airstream needs to be an option as well. Otherwise ... it isn't going to happen with her generation and PM.
Yes, PM is geared for pro's ... but at the same time there are a whole horde of potential new users ... with a bit of attention to how social media is now expected. Apple and now Microsoft and others have built it. Photomechnic now needs to come. (imho)
So ... I'm giving much thought to buying the new version of PM tomorrow. I wonder if my digital imaging workflow house of cards will work with PM for the ultimate in metadata, ingesting and automation; with Capture one as the ultimate in IQ and Aperture as a need since it is the only program that takes into account the final purpose of all this trouble. I wonder how the new catalogue program will affect the workflow landscape, possibly completely changing it. And I, would't be fully honest if I didn't mention the fact that I am also giving serious thought to instead deleting PM 4.x off of my drives and the same with Capture one v6, rather than upgrade both. Let the ultimate in simplicity win instead? I dunno. Tough to make the choice without knowing any leaked details of PM catalogue. ( I can understand ... but still)
Much to think about. Sorry about the long post. Any advice ... appreciated.
