Month: March 2024

Today’s Question: Is there a particular app you recommend for optimizing photos on a smartphone? Sometimes I want to be able to edit a photo on the go without waiting until I’m at my computer.

Tim’s Quick Answer: I consider Snapseed to be one of the best options available for optimizing photos in a wide variety of ways using a smartphone. In addition, for photographers who are making use of the Adobe Lightroom ecosystem, the Lightroom mobile app provides a good solution for basic editing.

More Detail: Snapseed is a remarkably powerful mobile app for optimizing photos. Originally developed by Nik Software (original makers of the Nik Collection), it is currently owned by Google. The app includes a range of simple presets under the Looks heading, as well as powerful adjustment options under the Tools heading.

The available adjustments range from basic tone and color, special effects, image cleanup and correction, and much more. While it can take a little getting used to Snapseed considering the large number of adjustments options it includes, I do consider it an excellent app for optimizing photos on a mobile device.

Another very good option is the Lightroom mobile app. The adjustment options within the Lightroom mobile app match those found in Camera Raw, the Lightroom desktop application, and the Develop module in Lightroom Classic. You can optimize photos that have been synchronized to the cloud via the Lightroom ecosystem, including photos synchronized via collections from Lightroom Classic. You can also use the Lightroom mobile app to import photos from your device or to capture photos with the built-in camera feature.

There are, of course, a large number of apps that provide various editing features for mobile devices. In my experience, however, Snapseed is among the best when it comes to providing a range of powerful features, and Lightroom provides a good solution for photographers already using other tools within the Adobe Lightroom ecosystem.

Today’s Question: Is there some setting in Lightroom Classic that needs to be on in order to download folders of focus-stacked images? When I downloaded photos from a memory card that included a mixture of single images and focus-stacked bursts into Lightroom Classic, the folders that my camera had put each focus-stacked burst into were overlooked. Is there some simpler route I am overlooking?

Tim’s Quick Answer: You can preserve the folders created by your camera when importing photos into Lightroom Classic by using the “By original folders” option in the Destination section of the right panel in the Import dialog.

More Detail: Many cameras will create various folders containing the photos you have captured. For example, some cameras will group photos into folders in groups of 100 or 1,000 captures. As noted in today’s question, some cameras will also use folders to separate bursts of photos, such as those used for focus stacking.

When importing photos into Lightroom Classic, by default all photos from all folders on a media card will be downloaded into a single folder. In many cases this might be exactly what you want. But in some cases, such as with the focus-stacking example, you may very much want to preserve the folders created by the camera.

To do so, specify the destination for the photos you’re downloading in the normal way within the Import dialog. However, be sure to select the “By original folders” option if you want to retain the folder structure from the camera when downloading your photos as part of this process.

For example, if you captured these photos during a photo trip to a specific destination, you might be downloading the captures into a folder named based on the trip. But by using the “By original folders” option, subfolders will be created based on the folders present on the media card as they were created by the camera.

Today’s Question: How dependable do you feel Time Machine is for backing up the internal hard drive on a Macintosh computer? Put another way, if you needed to wipe the hard drive on a Mac, would you trust Time Machine to restore the computer without losing any personal data?

Tim’s Quick Answer: I consider the Time Machine backup to be very dependable and have used Time Machine to configure each new Macintosh computer I have purchased based on a backup of the computer I was replacing.

More Detail: Time Machine is the built-in backup feature of the Macintosh operating system, and in my view it provides two key benefits that I think make it very worthwhile use Time Machine to back up the internal hard drive for any Macintosh computer.

The first benefit of Time Machine is that it provides a complete backup of all user files on your computer. This means you can use a Time Machine backup to completely restore a computer. For example, if you buy a new Macintosh computer you can restore from a Time Machine backup of your previous computer to configure the computer with all user data intact. I have used this feature on numerous occasions when configuring a new computer, as well as when I need to erase a hard drive for maintenance purposes and want to restore from a Time Machine backup.

The second benefit is that Time Machine maintains a historical backup of user files on your computer. This includes versions of documents, though the availability of older versions depends upon the storage capacity. For example, let’s assume you that for the past few months you have had an important document on the desktop, and you’ve been updating that document on a regular basis. Then you realize that a few days ago you deleted the document.

In this type of situation, you could simply launch the Time Machine application, navigate to the storage location where the file you want to recover exists, and scroll back in time to the most recent point when the document still existed. You would then be able to recover the file by copying it back to the desktop. This feature would even enable you to recover an older version of a document even if the updated version hadn’t been backed up.

Many readers know that I use GoodSync (http://timgrey.me/greybackup) to back up my external hard drives, and that I use Backblaze (https://timgrey.me/cloudbackup) for an online (and therefore offsite) backup of my internal and external drives. But I also maintain a Time Machine backup for the internal hard drive on my computer (though Time Machine can also backup your external hard drives if you’d like).