iPhoto Options

[FelicityW]

I have dutifully used iPhoto since its inception. I have endured losing dates on pictures, losing pictures, having pictures duplicated and triplicated, having thumbnails created, losing resolution, and so on. I have been a good little Apple automaton, but since there are better offerings in iOS for every Apple app, I thought perhaps there are better offerings in OS X as well. I bought Elements last year to do some more sophisticated editing but haven't even opened it as the project was delayed. I don't need anything too fancy, I have no interest in having cloud-only storage (I just don't see that ending well...), and mostly I would like to be able to rapidly compare images, decide which ones stay, and edit the chosen as needed. I find iPhoto remarkably cumbersome for those simple tasks.

I have very low interest in social media and when I share, share the old fashioned way, as attachments. I probably have 6K (where is image count on iPhoto?) or so images and am in the process of having film digitized so more will be coming. Mostly, they need to be culled, leaving the best. I have a 2013 13" Retina MBP (which is ironic because I mostly use 27" Apple monitor) w/ 16GB of RAM.

Open to thoughts and suggestions on alternatives..... I almost bought Aperture once upon a time but didn't want to spend the money for more product than I thought I would use at the time, and now it is going away.

 

[Steveatesh]

Personally I'd go with Lighroom for your needs, unless you regularly go for pixel level editing, in which case stick wth elements.

Lightroom can still be bought as a stand alone product rather than creative cloud, and rumors suggest LR6 due in March will offer large speed gains (possibly going to use the GPU from that version?).

LR has significant cataloging capabilities as well as being the industry standard for editing (or developing as they call it) your newly taken photographs.

My two pennorth anyway!

 

[robgendreau]

Ditto on Lightroom; there's also a trial. It allows some editing, certainly more than iPhoto. And it's great for organizing photos. Unlike iPhoto, it works ONLY by referencing photos, so they stay where you put them.

You might take a look at a new addition to the field, SnapSelect by MacPhun. It doesn't create a storage scheme for photos, but concentrates on the import workflow to cull and to eliminate dupes. Unfortunately they don't have a demo.

At the opposite end there's the oldie but goodie Graphic Converter; it has an image browser and lots of editing features. Very capable; does far more than convert. And a demo is available at their website. It works on the browser mode rather than a database mode like LR or Aperture, but that is actually preferable for many. If you have keywords in your photos, then with GC you can filter and wind up with groups of photos that are functionally similar to what you'd get using collections in LR.