Lightroom and iPhoto

When I first moved to apple I quite liked iPhoto and did not consider how my photos are stored on the computer – honestly I assumed that they are stored the same way iTunes stores music. Quite  a while later however I discovered that my pictures are now only accessible through iPhoto. I did not like this at all and was happy that I had discovered this before I invested in Aperture which – at least at the time – handles pictures the same way, taking control over them away from me. This is why I ended up with Lightroom even though I missed both features “Faces” and “Places”. The later now made it to Lightroom and I am good without the other. One thing I do however still miss is the nice screen savers that come with mac and can be feed through iPhoto. So far I have not found a good way to get the same experience using Lightroom. But there are a few possible solutions I have come across. If you know of any other solutions please write a comment below.

LRSaver

The LRSaver is a plugin that seams to work quit nicely. It will either use your entire Lightroom Catalogue or any Lightroom Collections for its slideshow. So far so good. The images are however based on the previews stored with the library. Since I don’t keep them for longer than a week the basis for the slide show is quite limited – not good. The next thing is that images are – to my knowledge – only to be displayed one at a time. So there is no way to get all the nice shows that come with a mac. To top it of, they ask about 15$ for the software – which in my opinion – is to much.

So nothing for me.

iPhotoPublish plugin

iPhotoPublish is a free plugin for Lightroom that enables you to directly publish images to iPhoto. The plugin however generates new events called “Lightroom Publish Batch #” seemingly containing a random number of images. So that is also not what I am looking for as I would like to minimize work needed in iPhoto afterwards.

Manual work

The last idea I have to solve the problem is manual work. I first edit the pictures in Lightroom to my liking and then export them using a preset. Once the export is done I import the images into iPhoto. This way I can keep smaller images in iPhoto and the originals in Lightroom.

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