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Best alternative to iPhoto???

carrollf

carrollf

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 8, 2007
225
0
Ireland
Ok...iPhoto has officially driven me in sane for the last time! I need to get something better but what? Is Aperture 2 what I need or Photshop Elements?

What I want is a simple program that lets me do some good editing but does not mess around with storing my photos in libraries that I cant access thru finder etc.. - I have lost too many photos that way.
 
I wish Google would bring Picasa to the Mac. That'd be great. But unfortunately, for now at least, iPhoto is pretty much the only game out there, other than the expensive Aperture and Photoshop Elements.

Incidentally, a bit of Googling brings up this. Hopefully that means soon!
 
ravenvii said:
iPhoto is pretty much the only game out there
Click to expand...

Sorry, but you're totally wrong, there are lots of other great image programs out there. Graphic Converter is one of the best all around image apps. Graphic converter's image browser is one of the best out there, on any platform. The image browser is extremely customizable so you can set it up to see as much or as little picture information as you like. When you grab the pictures off your camera it saves them as regular files on your disk, not a library.
 
motulist said:
Sorry, but you're totally wrong, there are lots of other great image programs out there. Graphic Converter is one of the best all around image apps. Graphic converter's image browser is one of the best out there, on any platform. The image browser is extremely customizable so you can set it up to see as much or as little picture information as you like. When you grab the pictures off your camera it saves them as regular files on your disk, not a library.
Click to expand...

Graphic Converter has languished in development for a while so I thought it was pretty much dead. Going to that site, it seems it's still being developed. It was (is) a great app, but has pretty much slipped out of popular memory.
 
Huh?

You've lost too many photos with iPhoto?

Could you explain to me how that's possible?
 
ravenvii said:
Graphic Converter has languished in development for a while so I thought it was pretty much dead. Going to that site, it seems it's still being developed. It was (is) a great app, but has pretty much slipped out of popular memory.
Click to expand...

Really? I seem to remember graphicconverter being updated pretty continuously throughout its life starting from way back in the Classic MacOS days. Anyway, it's been in very active development for at least the past several many years and is a really great image app. I use it all the time for a zillion different things and I'd be at a real loss without it.

And it's shareware! Go download the fully working program right now!
 
26139 said:
You've lost too many photos with iPhoto?

Could you explain to me how that's possible?
Click to expand...

oh ive lost photos with iphoto. will show up in a preview but once i click it it says the file is gone


very annoying and makes me distrust it somewhat

on the same note, ive had itunes "lose" multiple songs on multiple occasions
 
dukebound85 said:
oh ive lost photos with iphoto. will show up in a preview but once i click it it says the file is gone
Click to expand...

Wow, that sucks! If that ever happens again you can double check in the finder to see if the image file is really gone, or just that iPhoto's database has lost track of it. To view your image files through the finder just control-click a thumbnail in iphoto and select "show file." This will open up your image library as a finder folder that you can browse normally.

I can only guess that Apple hid this feature as being available only through a control-click because they think most people would completely muck up the system if they went around renaming the image files that iphoto points to. Either that or it's just poor interface design, which the modern Apple is no stranger to (*cough* itunes and iCal *cough*)
 
ravenvii said:
I wish Google would bring Picasa to the Mac. That'd be great. But unfortunately, for now at least, iPhoto is pretty much the only game out there, other than the expensive Aperture and Photoshop Elements.

Incidentally, a bit of Googling brings up this. Hopefully that means soon!
Click to expand...

I'm waiting for this as well... I've tried several other applications but still can't find anything that compares to Picasa. One of the simple things I miss is "watching" a directory for changes and auto-importing them. I like having my folder management done outside of the app.
 
Yeah, when I stored photos on Windows I always used the filesystem to create folders sorted by date, e.g.

2006-05-12 Camping Trip
2006-07-24 Birthday
2007-01-01 New Years Party

and inside would simply be a collection of the numbered JPEGs from the camera.

Some events I need to track various sub-collections, for example inside a camp photo archive under the "Week 2 2007" folder I might need to keep a set of folders called "Photos from John", "Photos from Tom", "Official Slideshow", and so on. John or Tom simply give me their memory cards and I dump the photos right into the appropriate folders.

As much as I like flipping through iPhoto libraries, tagging keywords and events, I really haven't found anything more efficient for me than this simple filing system.

The last version of GraphicConverter I've used was the one that came free with my PowerBook G4 back in 2003. I'm glad to hear it's still in active development and I'll be trying out the latest version again shortly!
 
Me, too. I use my own filing system by naming folders as I DL from my SLR.

I do not really know why people like to hate on the program that I am about to mention, but I love Adobe's Bridge for any sort of group viewing, or looking for photos. The cheapest way to get bridge is to buy Elements 6, Bridge comes with it for free.

I still use Tiger as a personal preference (even though I have a c2d imac that came with a drop-in upgrade for 10.5), so quick look is not an option for me.
 
notjustjay said:
Yeah, when I stored photos on Windows I always used the filesystem to create folders sorted by date, e.g.

2006-05-12 Camping Trip
2006-07-24 Birthday
2007-01-01 New Years Party

and inside would simply be a collection of the numbered JPEGs from the camera.
Click to expand...

Same, although I'll do a bit of tagging to make searching through Lightroom easier. I never colour tag photos, never give star ratings, etc. I'll just put a short description for one photo, keyword tags (e.g.: Me, Friends, girlfriend, party, night, landscape, macro, cityscape, etc), location, etc, and then apply these changes to all the photos from that event.



My files are like yours:
YYYY-MM-DD Michael's 27th birthday party, Beach Bar 01.jpg
YYYY-MM-DD Michael's 27th birthday party, Beach Bar 02.jpg


I even have an Automator Script to help me do it. :) Adobe Lightroom can also do this, but I don't prefer it because for whatever reason, it's not as flexible with regards to how everything looks. I can't get the last numbers to look exactly how I like them, and I'm a bit obsessive-compulsive about this, so it's an issue for me.

motulist said:
Sorry, but you're totally wrong, there are lots of other great image programs out there. Graphic Converter is one of the best all around image apps. Graphic converter's image browser is one of the best out there, on any platform. The image browser is extremely customizable so you can set it up to see as much or as little picture information as you like. When you grab the pictures off your camera it saves them as regular files on your disk, not a library.
Click to expand...

Thanks. I didn't know GC had an image browser. However, I like Adobe Lightroom a lot (!!!), and have been using it since Beta 2, so I'll stick with it. The browsing section is similar, except without the view of the typical hierarchical filing system. However, you can do it really similar in Lightroom, which is how I have things organized. Also, the editing is really great with Lightroom.

I keep trying new versions of Aperture, but it's still too slow for the really frequent tasks, and the editing isn't as quick and intuitive for me. I do see the benefits of how it's organized compared to Lightroom, but meh.
 
I like to use my own filing systems as well and when I first switched to the Mac I found it awkward to deal with photos w/o using iPhoto so I purchased Photoshop Elements having used it previously on Windows and Adobe Bridge got things right for me.

IMO Photoshop Elements 6 for $89 is not a bad deal at all.
 
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