Managing Photos On My Laptop

A few months ago, I was deciding between traditional photo apps and settled on Adobe Bridge. But then I reverted to Google Photos because I had started to lean back into a Chromebook. Yet moving my photo collection from my local PC into Google's cloud over time pressed me: I would soon need to subscribe to a paid cloud storage plan, and I would need to further cull and organize my picture files on my laptop. Then I snapped out of Google Photos. Bridge is the way to go.

Storing and organizing

My photos are already neatly stored on my laptop, ALL OF THEM. I have plenty of local storage, bought and paid for. Why subscribe to Google Photos for cloud storage? A monthly fee? Bleh! By not moving my photo collection to the cloud, I'm saving myself work. Yet I need to manage my photos anyways; it just makes more sense to do it on my laptop with Adobe Bridge — where I had previously settled.

That earlier process, though, had been a slog since I encountered numerous old tags from Lightroom and was having trouble sorting them out with new tags I had recently added. That's when the simplicity and convenience of Google Photos attracted me. You can't tag photos, but you can add them to albums manually, which is simpler. Then I later realized that with Adobe Bridge, I could do the same thing. Instead of laboriously tagging all my photos and then making smart albums that auto-populate, I can drag-n-drop my photos to plain albums. Nice and easy.

So the benefits of Bridge to me are:

• saves money
• keeps photos local
• provides simple, direct management while offering more features if I want

Editing

There's still the question of editing. I can use Microsoft Photos for most images most of the time. I rarely do more than simple adjustments. But I can also use Google Photos on recent pictures to edit them and download those to my collection. And I might still buy Photoshop Elements. If those are not enough, more editing solutions exist, so no worries. One I'm leaning towards is Affinity Photo 2.

Archiving

Besides some editing here and there, I use Google Photos as part of my "digital photography workflow" since it's baked into my Android phone. I back-up recent photos, with enough free storage to store about a year's worth in the cloud. And on my laptop, I back-up all my photos to a separate local drive.

Wrap-up

By itself, Google Photos is a great solution for managing images. But it requires a subscription fee to store all that data. Yuck. And I still prefer local apps and files. Part of me is stuck in the old-school "desktop publishing" days, back when burning a CD was fancy. And part of me is excited for modern cloud computing with all its conveniences. For now, I'm comfy with my thousands of photos stored locally on my laptop.