August 8th, 2008
What do you use to manage your photos on Mac?
So after hours of reading about this on the web, I figured I'd turn to my friends. I am hoping there is a simple program out there for viewing and organizing photos. (editing is a different story) I used Acdsee in Windows, and loved it. Yes, iPhoto is nice, but just like everyone else I've spoken to, I don't like that simply rotating a photo when viewing creates a modified version doubling the photo's disc space. I also don't like the way iPhone structures directories, but I know as a Mac user I'm not supposed to care about such things. :-)
I think my needs are simple.
- I'd like to be able to view and sort photos by name, date, and size. iPhoto does not sort by size, and only seems to have thumbnail mode, no list/details mode. I like the iPhoto's Albums, but am still a bit confused by Albums versus Events. (I know, an Album can have multiple Events)
- I'd like to be able to tag photos, and obviously search/filter on tags. I like iPhotos's tagging, but does it follow one of the standards? Meaning, if I spend hours tagging photos, and then move to another program, will the tags still be applied to the photos? I've seen some iPhoto to Flickr export tools that seem to keep the tags, but is that via programming magic, or due to standards support?
- I'd like to have batch rename tools built in. (to rename the archaic camera formats to something that makes sense) I've seen tools like FileWrangler and ABetterFinderRename, and understand there are Automater scripts that can do this.
- I'd like basic editing, such as resize and crop.
Aperture and Lightroom are talked about a lot, but are both $300, while Acdsee is $30 and Acdsee Pro is $130. Shoebox seems to have potential.
