[movedx]

Please don’t take this as me saying you were wrong to ever trust Apple, however the best way to organise any data is usually just files on a disk.

That’s becoming a recurring theme for me and even some of my corporate clients now. Confluence, for example, is out the window for secure documentation around sensitive environments and Word Docs in One Drive are back in. It’s surprisingly refreshing and gets the job done way better.

[m463]

From what I recall, aperture did use files-on-a-disk, maintaining original photos read-only and letting everything else be operations on those originals.

(am I recalling correctly?)

[dgxyz]

Agree with all of this, apart from possibly OneDrive but that's for another post.

Not Apple-specific really that point for sure anyway. Personally I don't think we should ever ever trust any vendor to control our data or act as a proxy for access to it. If it's not on a physical disk in your hands, in a format which is documented and can be opened by more than one application, then you're one step away from being screwed. There are so many tangible risks we love to sweep under the rug from geopolitics, commercial stability, security, bugs to unexpected side effects. And I've seen some real horror stories on all of those fronts.

At the same time I managed to embed myself thoroughly in it and I'm 3 months in to undoing the mess. It's VERY hard to get back to files on disk. No moving away from that is probably the best option I suspect a lot of us never took.

Hardest stuff to get out of is iCloud/Apple and Adobe.

[jwr]

It's all true, but if you think organizing photo archives is easy, boy have I got news for you.

Metadata, versions, version groupings, projects, albums, there is lots of structure that most people don't realize exists.

Think every picture has an EXIF date and that's the date when it was taken? Think again. Scanning date is not the same as picture date.

Actually, even if you think of a date, you probably imagine the usual ISO8601 2026-01-14T17:37:46Z date — how about when we only know a year? This is something Aperture didn't do either, but when dealing with photo archives what you want is arbitrary precision date intervals. E.g. 1900-1902 for example.

Anyway. Just pointing out that even though "just files on disk" is the right approach, managing those files and their metadata is far from obvious.

[f_allwein]

Power tip: replace the Word docs with Markdown.

[UqWBcuFx6NV4r]

Thinking that Markdown is comparable to a Word doc for even most purposes is delusional.

[wtallis]

Markdown should work reasonably well for the use case of Confluence pages that have been moved into Word docs.