Howdy from McKinney, Texas

My name is Bert Cheney.  I started using Aurora HD in 2017, and I also got the 2018 version.  But for this year, I chose to go with Luminar 3, mostly for the Library feature.  Long ago I used Aperture on my Macs and I liked that library setup.  It looked like Luminar 3 would me what I liked best about Aperture.  I am not disappointed.

My wife and I worked for months planning a trip to Europe in May and June 2019.  I wanted the Library to keep up with us. I use a Sony A7ii camera and she uses a Sony A6000.  I shoot all RAW and she shoots all JPG.  We have suffered memory card failure on past trips, so we are overly cautious about backups.

Here is how I prepared for the trip.  I synchronized the time/date on the cameras to nearly the same second.  I installed Luminar 3 (it was 3.1.0 at the time) on my 13 inch laptop.  I wrote a little script that copies images from a SD card  and puts them in a named directory on my laptop and also on a USB thumb drive.  The JPGs go into one sub directory and the RAWs (for Sony they are ARW) into another sub directory.  Each day during the trip I used that script to move our images to the laptop and to a thumb drive.   

Luminar on my laptop kept up very nicely with us and allowed me to do a little bit of post processing and rating of images as we went along our trip.  Her images, my images, and both sets collated in time were available at the tap of a button.  Brilliant.

When I got home, I copied the images from the thumb drive onto my desktop and copied the catalog from my laptop to my desktop.  When I told the desktop Luminar to use the copied catalog, all of my ratings and processing showed up as I had hoped.

Yes, it takes time to copy the 1550 images and it takes time for Luminar to "settle down" when suddenly presented with a new 1550 image library and catalog.  But I am OK with that.  We are talking half an hour, maybe, not half a day!

My wife makes wonderful digital scrapbooks on HER desktop.  So I have been able to copy the images to her desktop, and give her a copy of my catalog, so she gets my processed images to use.  (I think a NAS would serve me better than all of this copying, but my household is not up to NAS yet.)

Bottom line is that Luminar is serving us very, very well.  We are not professionals, just hobbyists.  I also realize that Luminar is a product that is still in development so I expect a few hiccups along the way.  But overall, I see Luminar as a great product and addition to my hobby.