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0 pointsFabHK1y ago0 comments

See, the file system is a fine system for general data, but if you have data of a specific kind, then there’s often a better way than just dumping them in the file system. That’s always been Apple’s approach: let data assigned to a specific app be handled by that app [1].

Apple’s approach has also been to allow export of that data into standard interoperable formats (be it music, photos, emails, contacts, calendars, etc.).

And FWIW, the photos are in “~/Pictures/Photos Library” - that must have been very difficult to find.

[1] it had two pieces of metadata, content type and creator, for files in Mac OSes prior to OS X, when it regressed to the windows/Unix way of handling things with inelegant file extensions.

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fishtacos1y ago

Windows has a Pictures folder. Before they started screwing with the OneDrive directories, it used to be in ONE location. Now it's in OneDrive\directory location, which works, even if it annoys me. The upside being automatic backup and restore. That Pictures folder is accessible systemwide and is accessible through EVERY application that can browse directories.

The Photos library on the Mac was not accessible via Lightroom Legacy. He (& I) could not locate it through the "Browse" functionality within the application. I think I could open the photos through finder, but could not import them through Lightroom Legacy. I could, however, Open With: from the Photos app, which then imports into the application just fine. This irked him enough to not want to do it, and I explained that it was the only way to do so, or otherwise export and import the desired photos in bulk.

I see what you're saying, but Apple's approach was clearly not intuitive for me, nor the Mac user. It's what it is, but Apple needs to facilitate working with their virtual folders/libraries natively through applications, not force users to resort to using workarounds... to export into interoperable formats for applications that run natively on their OS. Either Adobe is screwy or Apple is screwy here, but I'm leaning on Apple so far.

PaulHoule1y ago

There has always been a vision in computing where you can access the same data with different tools.

In the Kernigan and Plauger Software Tools book that describes the Unix user space you could use tools like wc, awk, sort, uniq, and grep, bound together with the shell, to do all kinds of things on plain text files.

As a photographer of course I want to share images between Lightroom Classic and DxO and as a computer graphics “artist” (I almost want to say “technician”) I want to work with images in Photoshop, web editors, tools I write to create images, etc.

Shouldn’t I be able to make music with GarageBand and then listen to it in iTunes and then write a program that plays it through my smart speakers at sunrise to wake me up?

Office 95 revolved around COM which meant that a Microsoft Word file was a composite file that could also contain data from other programs like PowerPoint and Excel so I could embed a small spreadsheet in a word document. (The fact that this system was documented and open was a weakness as much as a strength because you never knew if the recipient of a file had all the applications to open it)

Currently Office uses a documented XML and ZIP based file format. It is easy-peasey to load data in Excel format into pandas to do data analysis (less error prone than CSV even.). It’s not hard to write a program in PHP or Java that makes an Excel sheet complete with formulas for somebody to fill in then have them upload it back to a web site and suck the data out.

Locked in data is one reason why the cloud and mobile age feels like a step backwards than forwards, never mind the possibility of losing your data because you couldn’t pay the bill or your vendor got bought by Google, etc.

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