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Use Photos app as a catalog.


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I'm enjoying Photo for the most part but have the following wish. The ability to use the Photos app as a catalog i.e. from within AP, you can open the camera roll of the iPad and open images directly without the need to import first. Any changes made to the image are saved within AP but you then have the option of saving these changes back to the camera roll (photos app) or exporting as a new image. This also opens up the door for batch exporting.

Consider the following example:

I import 200 wedding photos onto the iPad. Currently if I wanted to work on these images in AP, I would need to import each one individually, make any changes and then export each one individually.

With the feature I am requesting, you could browse through all 200 images without the need to individually import each one. This makes it much faster to work through all 200 images and make any edits. Now when complete, you can select all 200 images in AP and export as a single operation with some global settings such as resize, sharpen or adding a watermark.

 

A couple of apps I use today already offer this way of working and it is much quicker than importing individual images. The apps for reference are Photogene and Polarr - both available on the App Store although it appears Photogene has been abandoned as it hasn't been updated in a couple of years.

 

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Now RAW files are working from the Photos app, this makes this request even more pertinent. Please consider this for a future revision although I concede it would likely be a big undertaking.

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I totally agree. But when it comes to editing AP will need to put the changes somewhere since the Photos app does not support complex manipulations and actionable change logs as AP does. As with Pixelmator it is unavoidable for AP to create (at least a temporary) image for its own purposes. So, there is always some kind of “import”, though not noticable. It should, however, be possible to write the changes back into the same file in Photos without creating a duplicate—that feature would be highly appreciated :)

 

As for batch processing, to my knowledge Photos does not allow writing back more than one image at a time. AP would need to implement some sort of pseudo batch processing to accomodate the restrictions of iOS. That would involve imports as well. But maybe Apple changes the way how that works in future iterations of iOS.

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I totally agree. But when it comes to editing AP will need to put the changes somewhere since the Photos app does not support complex manipulations and actionable change logs as AP does. As with Pixelmator it is unavoidable for AP to create (at least a temporary) image for its own purposes. So, there is always some kind of “import”, though not noticable. It should, however, be possible to write the changes back into the same file in Photos without creating a duplicate—that feature would be highly appreciated :)

As for batch processing, to my knowledge Photos does not allow writing back more than one image at a time. AP would need to implement some sort of pseudo batch processing to accomodate the restrictions of iOS. That would involve imports as well. But maybe Apple changes the way how that works in future iterations of iOS.

I would urge you to take a look at how Photogene works to see what is possible. It no doubt does some form of background import for any image you make changes to but it is transparent to the user. It also will allow batch export back to Photos but again, not sure how this is achieved. The result though is an excellent experience for the user.

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I am aware of Photogene and its abilities and I would most appreciate those features making their way into AP. But I also believe this could be quite a feat to accomplish because of the necessary workarounds. It is not impossible, of course, but the simpler goal might be enabling transparent back-writing of changes to an image file on the device's Camera Roll first and then heading for batch processing.

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