Charlotte, showing me her bruises from New Found Glory: I've got this one, and this one, and...that's chocolate.

I tried Affinity Photo 2 for a comically short amount of time. According to Mastodon, it was precisely one hour before I brought my laptop to the sofa and started trying everything I could think of to get Lightroom sync working again. The magic bullet appeared to be logging out of Creative Cloud and logging back in again, which is so immensely logical I'm surprised it wasn't the first thing I tried.

I watched so many different videos on how to do things in Affinity, and none of it makes sense. I massively take for granted the fact that I can make edits whenever I feel like in Lightroom. I don't have to make edits, then bake them in before exporting. I can't believe that's a way some people are fine with working. I gained a new appreciation for how good Adobe's smart object removal stuff is as well. I know it's cheating and I know some people hate it, but I cannot be bothered to use clone stamps any more. This is the kind of generative AI I'm absolutely OK with: in a way it's destructive AI, I suppose.

I wish Apple would bring Aperture back. I reluctantly switched from that to Lightroom, and I would happily go back in a heartbeat for no other reason than to be free of Adobe stuff (for this purpose anyway - we still use it a bit at work, even though most is done with Figma, which I also don't really like for different reasons!).

My workflow from mobile is about to get super annoying and I'm not happy about it. Because I use Apple's Photos app as my persistent, rendered album effectively, I export everything from Lightroom to that, then upload to my blog when I want to blog things.

Some of these images come out huge (like 50MB) and I don't want those taking up space on Cloudflare R2, so what I'm going to have to do is do two exports: a blog export where things are 2500px, write my blog post, delete those images, then re-export at full-res. That's super annoying, but I really don't want to have to use my laptop to blog again.

I'm also not going to be able to repair my older small-large images. There's 1,400 of them, and sometimes Apple renames them to something weird so there'd be no way to cross-reference them. And even if there was, I don't think I can programmatically ask Lightroom to re-render specific images for me, so I think I'm just going to have to draw a line under all this and start supporting larger images from now. I don't like that.