Alternative photo apps haven’t really stuck for me, but I am really appreciating a lot of what No Fusion does, so far. The interface feels pretty good, allowing for fairly natural feeling adjustments, and it has a nice set of film-like modes. It also claims to have a unique processing pipeline that improves detail and color. Does it? I don’t know; I’m not making direct comparisons, yet, but I do like what I’m getting from it. It feels deliberate enough and produces good enough output that it scratches a little of the same itch as using a bigger camera like my Fuji.
I’m impressed by Iris, an elegant and clever Mac app that does a bunch of delightful things.
I have an array of photos sources: Two Photos libraries from different eras of Mac and pre-Mac computers; more than a decade of flat file storage that make up my Lightroom libraries; and a big file tree of imported mobile phone photos from prior to when I began syncing everything through iCloud Photos.
Until using Iris, these have been separate catalogs, technically unifiable by dumping absolutely everything into a single Photos library, but I really don’t want to do that. Iris gives me this nimble application layered over all those existing sources, so for the first time I have this entire digital photos history viewable in one place. It’s marvelous and transformative as a way to have access in a unified way to such a span of time and places.
Iris has a lot more to dig into, like entirely on-device machine learning to identify faces and associate them with named people. I can add people details and then Iris will show me things like photos from a person’s birthday over the years. I’m just scratching the surface but I’m really excited by what it can do.
Sunday morning selfie.
I got out to ride the 2 Line to downtown today, where I had a croissant and a cappuccino at the beautiful Boon Boona cafe that sits above the waterfront. What a beautiful spring day!
There are some casual clubs in town that organize periodic group ferry rides – what a treat! Taking photos with other people who dig ferries! They look like fun and I’d like to join sometime. And it reminds me of the time I got severely scolded by a ferry crew for taking too many photos. Times have changed.
This small corner shop would become the place where I got the most delicious and satisfying meal of my trip — a luxurious katsu curry.
The MacOS Journal app feels so half-baked. I thought I’d try it for a travelogue of my past week, dragged some photos to it, and it just dumps them in a pile. There’s no arranging, scaling for layout of landscape and portrait, nothing. C’mon, Apple, I’m trying to not shell out for Day One again, here.
