You are reading the words of someone who has lost everything to a fire. Luckily, I was young and didn’t have a lot at the time. My parents lost far more when our house burned down between my sophomore and junior years of high school. It still taught me a lot about the impermanence of things though, and it is a lesson I carry with me through my life. Nevertheless, I get lazy. I am a photographer by hobby and I have thousands of digital photographs stored on my computer. I am fairly good about backing them up to external hard drives, and in OS X 10.5 (Leopard), Apple has made that process even easier with Time Machine

External backups are of limited use in some circumstances though. Take for example this last Autumn when I was traveling in Italy with Lisa. We were in Siena when my cell phone rang, our home number on the caller ID. There was no one expected in the house, and sure enough it was our home alarm system calling. A quick calculation told me it was just after 4:00 AM back home in Denver. The next call was from our monitoring company who dispatched the police to check things out. We were having lunch between the calls while I thought about what could be happening at home. Someone broke in through a window and set off a motion detector, a spider walked across a sensor, the possibilities were endless.

As I ran through them, however, one thing came to the front of my mind. Before we left I had done a backup of my 2007 digital photos, about 7000 RAW images cataloged in Adobe Lightroom, but I left the hard drive I had backed them up on sitting on top of my PowerMac G5. If anyone had broken into the house, they were likely to take the computer, AND the backup drive sitting on top of it. All my photos would be gone. Sure, I have uploaded some of them to flickr, but those are JPEGs, and much less useful than the original RAW files.

Fortunately, the police, and a friend, later confirmed that everything at home was fine. The alarm was more likely the work of the spider than the burglar. Yet the whole situation got me thinking again. Did I need to be more diligent about burning DVDs and putting them in the garage? How good was that solution anyway? Should I get a safety deposit box and start storing hard drive and optical backups there? These solutions seemed old fashioned in the age of cloud computing. After all, moving physical media around almost made me hear modem handshakes in my mind.

I had been aware of Amazon’s S3 storage service for some time, and I knew that the Jungle Disk was a decent interface for it that worked on the Mac. However, I just assumed that bandwidth was still prohibitive to getting the kind of data that I have backed up offsite through my DSL connection. However, I got to thinking about the amount of data I now move over my line anyway. I buy TV shows from iTunes, and rent HD movies with my Apple TV. How bad could it be to backup 60-80 GB of data to S3 storage? It turns out to be pretty reasonable if you can break your initial uploads into chunks.

I decided to use the Jungle Disk interface to S3. The program is $20, and I splurged for the plus service for an additional $1 per month to get resumable uploads and web access to my files. I am doing my initial uploads by year, to ease the pain of getting my data up there. It will likely take close to a month to get my 60 GB of RAW photos and Lightroom catalogs uploaded, but I will then have a secure, offsite backup that I can access from my multiple Macs, and the web, if needed, and all at a reasonable price. To store my current 60 GB of photos on S3, it will cost me about $9 per month. It will cost me another $6 in transfer costs to get it there. By the end of this year, I am likely to have 80 GB in photos, and that will raise my monthly cost to $12 per month, with another couple bucks in initial transfers to get it there.

Some of you might think this is not small change, and that $12 Per month can add up fast. However, I see this as quite a bargain. I have a lot invested in photography equipment and have spent countless more dollars on destinations where I have taken photos. My photos are priceless, and extremely mutable as digital files. S3 storage costs are a small price to pay for backing them up in the cloud. I realize that my storage needs will grow year after year, but I also believe that S3 prices will likely fall to keep the overall cost relatively linear over time.

Let me start by saying that I still like Aperture for its workflow. When I go back to the program to export masters, I find that I miss the interface with its heads up displays and support for variable workflows. Lightroom is a much more rigid program, one that assumes a somewhat linear workflow. I have gotten used to Lightroom and am very productive in it, but there are things about Aperture that I will always miss. That said, I feel confident that moving to Lightroom was the right thing to do, especially after the recent upgrades to Adobe Camera Raw, the engine behind both Photoshop and Lightroom for RAW conversion.

It all started when I decided to compare the RAW conversion from Aperture to that of Capture NX, Nikon’s own program. I was quite pleased with the results from Aperture until some of my readers showed me that it was really my lack of understanding of Capture’s tools that made the difference. Mastering Capture was not something I was interested in doing though, because the interface doesn’t follow consistent practices of other Mac (or Windows) software and the program is really an image editor, not a workflow system. One thing that I learned in the process though is that Apple didn’t use any specifications or APIs published by the camera manufacturers when it developed its RAW conversion process for Core Image, the foundation of Aperture, iPhoto, and even the OS for RAW conversion.

I think Apple did a fairly good job with Core Image, but I was lacking confidence in their commitment to sustain development and continue to improve their converter. At that time, both Lightroom and Photoshop CS 3 were in beta and I decided to test their conversion against Aperture and Capture Nx. I didn’t do a detailed write-up, as I did for Aperture and Capture, but I was quite pleased with Adobe’s conversions. When Lightroom 1.0 was released, I still wasn’t completely sold on its workflow, but I made the choice to switch based on the RAW conversion. After all, it is the image quality that is most important and my justification was based on one fact that I couldn’t bend in Apple’s direction. Adobe is a company that is completely dedicated to photography as a business and they have some of the top minds in the industry working on their products. That, and the fact that they use the published specifications for RAW conversion give me much greater confidence in the future of my images in Lightroom over Aperture. It is that confidence that lead me to make the switch.

Apple is a great company, and I own a lot of their technology. I just don’t think that Photography is their real core competency or that Aperture will really get the kind of resources it needs to keep moving forward as a leading product. Since my move to Lightroom, Adobe has continued to improve the product and the new ACR is enough validation that my choice was the right one. I don’t know what I would do without the Clarity control if I suddenly lost it. In addition to my increased confidence in the RAW conversion of my photos, I think I have gained a few other benefits from Lightroom as well. Here is a short list:

• Performance: Lightroom is much faster at displaying edits on the image.
• Integration with Bridge and Photoshop: I keep all my edits in XMP sidecar files and I can move back and forth between editing in Photoshop and Lightroom without loss of data.
• User community: Lightroom has been adopted by several leading photography writers and there is a plethora of information available on the web and in books

I am sure there are more. I am so used to Lightroom now that it is somewhat invisible to me, as it should be. However, I keep finding new features or shortcuts that make my life easier and I love to hear about others. If you have any, please feel free to share them in the comments below.

According to Clark:

One other feature I have noticed but need to look into further is that my raw Nikon D2x files seem to look better than they have in previous versions of Lightroom. It seems with the Adobe Camera Raw upgrade to version 4.3, the folks at Adobe have also improved the auto-rendering of some Nikon camera models. I’ll write more about this as I work up recent images.

This is statement demonstrates something interesting about RAW photos. Our opportunity to improve the quality of the final version will continue to get better as the technology improves. However, these changes might have unintended consequences for our work as well. Imagine a tweak to Adobe Camera Raw to improve highlight recovery. This improvement is something we would all look forward to, but then imagine that you go back to Lightroom to print some photos or burn a CD for a client and you find that all your existing photos with previous highlight recovery edits don’t look right. You may now have a better tool to process them all again, but that is a lot of extra work if you already had satisfactory versions.

Keeping a JPEG (or TIFF, if you have the room) version of your edited output is a good idea for this, and several other reasons. In my case, I keep JPEGs of all my final picks, rated 3 stars or more, in iPhoto and then export them to flickr. The main reason that I started cataloging them in iPhoto is that I gave up the tight integration with Apple’s other iLife products when I switched from Aperture to Lightroom. This way I have a manageable number of good quality work that is always available to me in my Mac applications (and even on my iPhone), but I also have an archive of the post-processing work that I did. Given improvements in ACR, I may someday go back and tweak a few photos here and there, but I can’t keep up with processing the stuff I am shooting now, never mind constantly reprocessing (or at least checking) historical work.