program to manage media collection stored on multiple devices ?

[paulCC]

Hello:
I have collected a large collection of photos I took over the years. I am afraid it's more quantity than quality, but that is a different subject :-)

I was wondering if there is a tool to do the following:
- keep selected photos on the main computer
- keep a small preview of all photos on the main computer
- support storage of full size photos on a set of external drives
- keep track of all the copies of the photos on several external drives on the main computer, so one can quickly find which external drive the original is on
- perform synchronisation of new photos to external drives, multiple sets for redundancy
- possibly even synchronise selected photos on the cloud

As I am re-reading the above, it sounds like a a lot of specialized requirements, but it seems to me like this is an issue facing anyone with a large set of media files.

PaulCC.

[phoenixsan]

to Aperture. Seems to me almost anything in your list can be done with it, natively or with plug ins, if you do some research. Only thing I doubt is about the cloud. But maybe Adobe Lightroom can be useful too.

[MCAsan]

With Lightroom you can keep the library database and thumbnails on an internal drive...and have photos in that library sitting on N other drives. The key is to move photos with LR, not the OS. When you move photos outside of LR, LR does not have a clue where the photos are located.

The last 3TB USB 3 drive we puchased at Costco was something like $130. So you can likely put all of you scattered photos onto one drive. And naturally use Time Machine to backup that drive (and all the others).