Sorting photos taken on different devices

Will James

Will James

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Will
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Hi all,

I'm trying to find the smoothest workflow for putting photos in albums to share with family combining photos taken on my iPhone and DSLR for the same trip. I use Dropbox to share the album so it's not the storage/platform aspect that I'm asking about.

My initial plan was to
1) export my DSLR photos from Lightroom after editing (done)
2) export the photos taken on my iPhone from the photos app on Mac.
3) sort the photos by date/time captured

Easy, right? No - I've just realised that there is no ability to sort photos using finder on Mac by date taken which is retained in the EXIF data of the photos exported by both the Lightroom and Photos apps, only date added/modified/created, all of which are stated as today's date since that is when I exported them. This means I can't seamlessly merge photos that were taken in between each other using difference devices.

So the 'leanest' way I can think of is:

1) export from Photos app to a folder
2) import to Lightroom
3) add iPhone photos to collection in LR with the DSLR photos --> sort by capture time --> export with sequenced file name.

The fact that there is this extra loop / group of steps seems really silly, plus the fact I now have a duplicated image being stored on my laptop (from Step 1).

I've seen an app for Mac called "Photo Exifer" which allows you to copy the EXIF "date taken" data to "date created" for Mac but this is still a faff and I assume if I did that with those photos exported by LR it would mess up the sync...

Am I missing something obvious here? Any advice to improve this?
 
Last edited:
I store my phone photos in Lightroom. If you get the LR app on your device, it will sync back to your desktop version of LR - which will give you all your images in one place. You can then sort by date and export them all in one go to the Dropbox location.

Which is what you're trying to do if I read your post correctly..?
 
Thanks, yes that's exactly what I'm trying to do.

Doesn't that create a duplicate file in your workflow overall? Ideally I would only have my DSLR photos in LR as I already have 24,000 DSLR photos in there.

So storing my phone photos in LR would mean:

If on Mac, I need to export them from the Photos app to a folder then import to LR to group with my DSLR photos, then export to the final Dropbox folder based on time taken.
If on Phone, I would be importing photos to LR mobile app which means it syncs to desktop then I can do the steps above for the rest.

Is that correct?
 
I can't speak for the Mac as I don't have one but the 2nd process you mention for "if on phone" is correct.

It doesn't create a duplicate file (for me) because I don't have another process for getting photos off my phone. Just the single import via LR. Once they're in LR, I often delete them from the phone to save space.
 
I always rename my photos now on import with a reverse date (and sometimes time) at the front. This means I can always sort by date order and also helps me find the original. Originally I did it because I was sharing an album with a friend and we wanted the photos chronological.

Retrospectively, you could export the photos with a date stamp at the front from Lightroom. This might mean you have to set up a new catalog for your iPhone photos, so that they can be exported with a date stamp.

Just realised you’ve probably sorted it by now [emoji848]
 
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