So I found myself with a dilemma after upgrading to the latest Photos app from Apple on my Macbook Pro. It supposedly takes over from both iPhoto and Aperture. I used to use Aperture, but it was a bit heavy for what I wanted it to do (in terms of just browsing photos and then doing touch ups using Photoshop). iPhoto was actually pretty good for what I was after. It would import a folder I’d drag in, and then I could flag photos I’d like to edit, and then edit them using Photoshop with a simple shortcut! Life WAS great, but it all stopped with Photos.
The biggest issue I had was that editing externally was only done through a right click contextual menu and then under a sub menu item. This was way too inconvenient.
So then I found Picasa. I’ve always filed this away, but I thought I’d revisit it and it does what I definitely prefer it to do. It maintains my folder structure, which is very important. There is no importing either. Under my Pictures folder, I normally name folders as the follows: 20150427 Event Name. Under that are the photos and then there is a folder called Keepers, which contains the Photoshopped files. This way, my originals stay intact. Picasa then just keeps a tab on my Pictures folder and keeps updating the catalog it keeps. So this ticked one of my boxes.
The problem came when I tried to edit with Photoshop. It was the SAME as Photos! The same right click contextual menu and sub menu. Yuck. I had a quick look online and found that Picasa opened up its API and allowed for custom buttons. Thats great! I also found some CS3 and CS4 buttons, but not CS5. I was surprised that it was slightly more difficult to find a CS5 button, until I came across Rob Bredow’s blog and article. He has managed to code it up so that it works with all versions of Photoshop (including mine). I hope that writing about this, brings his site some more traffic on this, as his plugin definitely works and should be the first hit in google, but its not.
I have a copy here for historical sake as I don’t want it to ever disappear. I do not own this code and all rights do sit with Rob Bredow, so please use his site if possible.
Back to my workflow, its now working a treat. I can skim through photos, star the ones I like, and then select all the starred ones and hit Rob’s magical button and away I go!