Our Favorite Software

Software runs the world and this family runs a lot of software! Below you’ll find the apps that help our family accomplish tasks and manage our digital libraries.

Key Features:

  • Available on both desktop/laptop and mobile.

  • Syncs photos and edits everywhere

  • Share albums (with an option to download JPEGs) which is handy for sharing with friends and family.

We’ve been using Lightroom since it launched in 2017 (and we used Lightroom “Classic” prior to that). Each year it seems to add more and more features. The auto masking (i.e. select “subject” and “sky”) are just wonderful.

All of our photos (over 50,000), including those dating back to 2004 are synced to Lightroom. Providing easy access and cloud storage for backup.

We occasionally dip into Photoshop for advanced editing (i.e. face swapping) but in general Lightroom has everything we need.

Key Features:

  • Amazing search capability

  • Great for videos, too

  • Extra backup

While we have all photos stored in Lightroom, we also upload all of them to Google Photos. The main reason is the search engine. Lightroom may eventually catch up to Google, but Google’s face search is incredible, here’s some examples of searches we’ve done:

  • “Danielle and Amelia and Reese” will find all photos in which these three appear in a photo together. Note: you’ll need to add names to faces first in order for this to work

  • “Do Good” will find photos of Milo and Pax in their Cotopaxi “Do Good” t-shirts

  • “Mountain” or “Bike” or “Colorado” or “Skiing” … well these are pretty self-explanatory but they do indeed work!

Note: this also works on video files as well. It’s just simply amazing.

Key Features:

  • Easy to use

  • Graphic design

We dabble in a bit of Graphic Design for our social media profiles and Danielle’s video content. Canva is a Photoshop alternative that has a ton of features.

For all of our video content we edit in iMovie and/or Final Cut Pro. Danielle is trying to outsource most of her editing now for her Mama Doctor Jones channel, but when she edits she prefers iMovie. When Donnie edits (which is rarely) he prefers Final Cut Pro.

Previous

Household Goods