Revisiting photos and organizing between many apps

Today’s my birthday and after getting the morning rush of texts and calls, it has calmed down now by lunch and I’m sitting here, sort of just relaxing and reminiscing.

My recent trip to Pakistan got me thinking a lot about my digital world. There’s Apple devices (iPhone, iPad, and Mac) that mainly act as my interface to the digital world I exist in and then there’s all the various software. There’s additional things like my gaming consoles, cameras, and keyboards but those are sort of specialists in what they’re built for. Almost all my connection to the internet happens through the Apple devices.

But with this connection comes a sort of walled garden effect. My own photos and videos are held in a somewhat proprietary format of Apple’s own devices (HEIC and HEVC). Even with support in many other apps, it still feels too specific.

But this post is not about formats, it’s about connectedness and sharing. I continue feeling stuck between the three main places where my photos exist. Apple Photos, Lightroom, and Google Photos. A fourth place that’s not a concern for me right now is Dropbox, those are older sort of “archived” photos so I don’t consider them to be necessary to have with me all the time. But all 3 of the main places are annoyingly siloed.

I want to find a perfect mix of being able to edit my photos in Lightroom, organize and share them using Apple Photos, and just have them available all the time within Google Photos. But alas, that’s not possible.

I’m writing this post as a way to start thinking of this problem and possible solutions for it. I don’t have any currently, but I think it could be possible.