Giving up trying to use both Lightroom Classic and Lightroom CC

The new Lightroom is too simple, and Capture One Pro is too disconnected from everything, so I want to use Lightroom Classic, which kind of falls in the middle.

I love Capture One Pro, but I thought I’d try using Lightroom Classic and set up catalog sync so that the “keepers” end up synced to Lightroom Desktop (or is it “CC” or just “Lightroom” I can never remember?). Anyway, this was supposed to allow me the power of “real” Lightroom (aka Lightroom Classic) along with the convenience of sync-everywhere and editing on mobile.

I’m here to tell you that I can not make it work for me. There’s too much overhead in having to decide what to add to a synced collection and when. And where to keep any synced originals? Do I do that in both apps? And so on. I seem to end up with duplicates for no reason I can fathom. I’m constantly moving images from the automatic synced folders to their proper place in the filesystem. It often feels like the worst of both worlds. I’ve seen people do it. I’ve watched the videos and read the blog posts. I’ve tried, but nope, it’s all too finicky for me.

So for now I’m going to try (again) to use the new Lightroom. I have a host of reasons for not liking it, but my current mood is allowing me to ignore those for now so that I can enjoy its simplicity and ubiquity.

I have to shoot a wedding next weekend, and I’m sure I’ll load that up into Capture One because C1 is better for things like that. But for the everyday shots, it’s Lightroom.

This all has been made possibly by Photo Mechanic. Lightroom’s metadata handling is cumbersome and it’s export features and file naming options are basically non-existent. Photo Mechanic happens to handle those things superbly.

It goes like this. Ingest from the card using Photo Mechanic. Rate, cull, rename, and add metadata in PM. Import into Lightroom for edits. For output I export full-size JPGs and then send them wherever I need in whatever combination of sizes I need using PM.

Let’s try it this way for a while and see if it fits.