Feedback / Inquiry - Affinity Photo

[Wingsley]

Hi folks!

I'm new to the forum. Was impressed with the things I've seen on the web about Affinity Photo.

I'm on a Core i5 iMac running MacOS 10.12 Sierra. I want to upgrade to Mojave.

I am still using iPhoto (v. 9.6.1), because I regard Photos (from Apple or Google) as iPhoto Lite. Apple abandoned iPhoto a few years ago and in the process they stopped serving my needs. I regard Photos as a smartphone/tablet photo appliance.

 

If Affinity provides these features in their Photo app, I'd like to learn more. If Affinity does not provide these features, I hope they will accept my feedback and come up with a "digital shoebox" app like iPhoto.

I store metadata in my iPhoto library as both prose captions and abbreviated labels in Events titles (I was improvising hashtag-like strings as titles long before the term "hashtag" was in use in social media).

I'm looking for something...

1. with iPhoto 9's power and metadata capabilities that will run on MacOS Mojave
2. with an iPhoto-like image cataloguing system that allows for easy search for items
3. that can import iPhoto's database and metadata without loosing/mangling it
4. that can store the photo database on an external hard drive if necessary
5. can allow images to be posted to social media directly, especially Twitter and Instagram
6. that can allow for a paragraph of two to be stored in "comments" metadata so I can write a prose caption for a photo or group of photos
7. that can download photos from smartphones and tablets (both iOS and Android), D-SLRs and point-and-shoots, just like iPhoto
8. that can do some light retouching within the app like iPhoto, or hand-off editing of a photo to an external editor like Photoshop

I have about 60,000 photos in my iPhoto library. Everything from family photos, to photos of work projects, to community events, to civic volunteer work bees. I need to find a way to preserve all these photos and info and be able to do what I do with iPhoto on MacOS Mojave without having to worry about iPhoto breaking. I plan to clean install Mojave if/when I find something that will work.

I've been looking at Photoshop Elements, but I'm not sure. I use Adobe Creative Cloud that is paid for by a business office I do part-time work for, but I regard Photoshop CC and Lightroom CC as a convoluted workflow with a lot of unnecessary features and procedures that are too distracting.

Are there any Mojave-ready photo cataloguing and minor-retouching apps out there to succeed iPhoto?

Thanks in advance.

[Fixx]

Affinity Photo will not do any cataloguing/databasing. There will possibly be separate Affinity DAM solution for that but it may be years away.

[fde101]

If you need something before that, either on1 Photo RAW or Capture One should be able to cover a lot of that turf, though possibly not all of it.

Skylum is supposedly releasing their catalog features in Luminar later this year, that could be an interesting option.  I haven't been super-impressed with the quality of the results I get when working in Luminar as compared to other programs but it is reasonably fast and depending on how well they put together their "libraries" solution and how easily you can edit in an external program from there it may be worth another look as a workflow system.  (Their Aurora HDR software on the other hand is easily the one to beat for initial processing of HDR images... then I take the results of that and open it in Affinity to do the rest of the work...).