After a 25 year sojourn from photography I’m just getting back into it… and loving every minute! I’m also finding I’m about as organized with my digital images now as I was with my photos back then, whether it was black & white darkroom images or colour prints. I had, and have the same shoe box workflow… ie. not very good at all.

Last fall we took a wonderful trip to Europe (River Cruise followed by a week in Paris) and came back with 3000 images, intent on inputting and finally sorting into my newly purchased Aperture. I bought into Joseph’s Aperture.expert.com and was about to embark on my newly found organizational modus operendi when Apple pulled the plug on Aperture… so it was back to the shoeboxes for me till I figured out what to do next.

I thought of moving to Photos but initially held back that move after reading all the naysayer reports here and elsewhere about how feature-poor it was. I purchased On1’s Perfect Photo Suite at about the same time as Aperture to take care of my “photoshop” type editing as it appeared to be a seamless workmate to Aperture. With so much negativity surrounding Photos I even took a look at Lightroom and Capture1 but am not a fan of the Adobe monthly fee… once locked into that structure do people not realize they have you by the short ones and can ransom you with whatever fee increases and add-ons they deem “necessary” in future?

Several things have kept me from moving away from Apple in this move back into photography. (and yes I have been an Apple user since 1980 with the first purchase of an Apple II+… that stills works when called upon). Firstly, my brother-in-law who is an avid travel photographer and who also worked in the photo business for some time… and who initially convinced me that I should go with Aperture as opposed to the Adobe platform etc himself made the switch from Aperture to Photos and let me know that there was a lot more under the hood than initially showed. Secondly Joseph’s very timely videos on Photos have really opened my eyes up to a relatively feature rich set of tools built in. Thirdly it appears my purchase of On1’s PPS9.5 was not all for naught as they will soon be making the handshake with Photos… hoping for news of this at WWDC in June. And lastly, after buying a new 13” travel-friendly MBPro I been playing around with the tools in Photos… and have been pleasantly surprised at their power and usefulness.

So now I have the problem of my shoebox… and how to proceed. Normally this probably is not a problem for most… as using iCloud Drive etc would be a viable option… however I do not have access to what anyone would call real hispeed (life in the boonies has that one downfall… and average .2mbps access with starting 3GB/mnth bandwidth!!). So I can’t sync my library across all my machines (27” iMac, 13” MBPro, iPhone, iPad) without going broke. I have photos on at least 6 other macs lying around waiting for me to pull them off and co-ordinate in one location, or archive.

I don’t need access to them all the time but here is what I would like to do:

• bring in all photos from various media and sources for initial culling in Photos

• archive photos that I don’t want to throw out, but that may not be 4 or 5 star ratings and are not what I want in my main, readily available Photos Library

• separate photos my daughter took years ago from her Europe trip and store somewhere else

• make available one set of prints that I can add to continually for viewing and editing across all my machines (synced to Photos/iCloud?), and that I can have readily available for viewing for my relatives through AppleTv (that would be payback time for all the photo albums we’ve endured!)… but also for my own coaching purposes.

I have been reading comments about multiple libraries and how only one is available to view on Apple TV without issues.

My main question is: Is there a solution anyone can offer that would allow me to use Photos within the limitations of my access to real HiSpeed?

I shoot with a D700, Raw files only.