As will be clear, I am not a photographer. I’m a studio artist, professor and researcher and I do use photos, in my teaching, to document my studio process, to document my completed art work, and even sometimes as the images themselves. The resources here have been so helpful to me, I wanted to share my experiences with Mylio in hopes they may be of use to others.

I bought Aperture when it first came out ($499!), used and abandoned it and then began using it again exclusively in 2007. I loved the features I understood, especially its editing and export features, but never made the effort to become an expert user. I took the demise of Aperture as my call to clean up my Aperture library. And I decided to edit and consolidate my no-longer-used iPhoto library AND all the folders of images scattered on my external drives.

So, for a month (probably longer but I’ll only admit to a month) I deleted duplicates and unusable photos, created archives of teaching topics (student studio work), created albums of my art work documentation and also labeled a few thousand travel photos in Aperture that are part of a six-year art project. That labeling involved looking at trip logs and at times consulting googlemaps.com and using image times to calculate just which rural town in was in. 

I also thought about my needs and my workflow and I made a decision to use Photos and iCloud for images that I use as lecture resources and as inspiration for my studio work, together with my current personal photos. (See below for more about Photos.) 
The result was that I culled about 18,000 photos down to some photo archives (10+ years of student work which I will access infrequently and can eventually trash), together with 2000 photos in Photos and 6500 photos in Mylio. 

For a lot of reasons, I did not export my (cleaned-up) Aperture library into Mylio. I decided to take my Aperture photos and export them as jpgs and bake in my edits. My file names and keywords were the only data I cared about (and the file name included the image date where it mattered) and I never made use of the RAW files I had imported into Aperture and also had no real use for my Aperture library features. (I also have TIFFs archived of the original files from the professional documentation of my art work.)

I chose Mylio because of its elegant interface and the ability to sync all of my photos among my iPad, iPhone, laptop and an external hard drive. I keep thumbnails on my phone, preview resolution on my iPad and the originals on an external drive. Mylio uses 3.6 GB on my laptop, 3.5 GB on my iPad, 282 MB on my phone and 140 GB on my external drive. 

(I back up my external drive to another hard drive via Time Machine when I’m in my studio and also back it up remotely using Crash Plan. “Soon” I’ll acquire a mirror of my Mylio drive so I can keep a backup at home so that I have hard backups in two different locations.)

For me, the priority in my workflow is being nomadic, nimble and flexible. I have a top of the line MacBook Pro and a 30” Cinema Display but I do 80% of my professional work on my iPad. I wanted to be able to share, view and edit my photos wherever I am.

So, given the way I work and want to work, I am absolutely thrilled with Mylio. I always used referenced photos in Aperture on an external drive but did not keep an organized folder structure at the Finder level. For me, the transparency of having my Mylio folders mimic my Finder folders and vice versa, with changes syncing immediately, is wonderful. And finally I can label or keyword or edit an image when I’m away from my studio and have the changes sync everywhere.

I’m still exploring Mylio’s features and I am reading Jordan Ayer’s Official Guide to Mylio. Again, for me, I find having a written reference helps with my knowledge building. And I haven’t taken any steps to decide which images I store originals of in the Mylio cloud.

I tested out Mylio this week by developing an album and exporting images for a presentation at a museum on my work. Using Mylio for this purpose was a delight. 

For me, the only limitation I’ve encountered in Mylio is that external editing in Photoshop is a little clunky. I duplicate the image and locate it in the finder using Mylio, then edit and save that image copy in Photoshop. At least with this process is that it’s crystal clear that I’m editing a copy of the image and I won’t inadvertently overwrite my original file. And the Lightroom, which is a “tray” which can hold images for adding to an album or labeling, etc, doesn’t sync between devices. The editing isn’t as robust as Aperture, of course, but it is adequate for most of my needs. 

Mylio isn’t for everyone but it fits the way I work and has helped me have an accessible and organized image library which is a joy to use.

A P.S. about Photos: Having my lecture resources in Photos and using iCloud means that I can easily edit my class lectures (which I present on my iPad) or can show a student a reference image when I’m in class. I bought Joseph’s excellent videos explaining the features of Photos and while the interface has its limitations, it’s adequate for now and I’m looking forward to plugins and other improvements.