← Martin Faust Photography
A lean library, without losing the shot that mattered.
I shoot more than I keep. Over the years I've settled on a simple, low-cost workflow built
around Apple Photos, and wrote a couple of small Mac apps to make it hold together.
My workflow
- 1
Shoot RAW + JPEG
The camera writes both files for every frame, full quality plus a ready-to-use JPEG. On my Canon EOS RP that is roughly 70 MB per RAW + JPEG pair.
- 2
Everything into Apple Photos
Import on the Mac or straight from the iPhone, it syncs either way. One iCloud library across every device, no separate catalog to maintain.
- 3
Group the near-duplicate sets, keep the best of each, and clear the rest, safely and non-destructively.
- 4
Sort out with RawPrune RawPrune · soon
Less compression, more sorting out. RawPrune backs up the RAWs of my favorites and reimports those as full-quality JPEGs (3 to 7 MB); every other shot comes back downscaled (500 KB to 1 MB). Only JPEGs stay in the library.
Why this setup
Everything in Photos
Every shot lives in Apple Photos, so face recognition, search and memories all just work, and the full library is on my iPhone to show anytime. Mine is well past 150,000 photos.
No monthly fees
Just iCloud+ for storage. No Lightroom or other subscription in the loop.
RAW when you need it
Full RAW quality on hand while a shot still matters and might get edited.
JPEG for the long haul
Only the JPEGs stay long term, so the library stays small and cheap to keep forever.