Is there a better photo management solution for the specific features I want?

[porcupine8]

For years, I didn't use any photo organization software. I had an EyeFi card in my camera, it put all my photos into folders by date, and I sorted through them in Finder.

Unfortunately, EyeFi no longer works, and without it auto-sorting everything into folders for me this system wasn't so great. So a few months ago I started trying to use Photos. But it won't let me do the very specific things I want to do.

There are three things I want to be able to do easily:

- Navigate and/or control the underlying file structure, so if I want to open a file in Photoshop I know where to find it. But I also want the files to be automatically organized when I import them.

- View a month's worth of photos at a time. In iPhoto, I would have to create a separate smart album for every month by hand - it took long enough to create one for every year (especially since the smart album dialogue resets to "photo is favorite" every single time).

- View the photos with a particular tag/keyword within the album/folder you're currently viewing. Without having to yet again make a new smart album by hand and choose "keyword is 'to print'" AND "date is 10/1/2016 to 10/31/2016" every single time. I'm looking at the October 2016 album, I want to be able to tell it to show only those photos in this folder that are tagged "to print" with just a click or two, then just as easily go back to viewing all the photos in the folder.


Right now, the best option I've found is to use SilentSifter to keep the files themselves organized into monthly folders, then Pixa using those as Live Folders for tagging and navigation.

Is there an easier/better/cheaper (this would be $45 for both of those) way to do what I want to do?

Being able to do basic editing in-app, which Pixa doesn't have, would be a nice bonus, but the above are the most important.

(Note: I use Adobe Bridge to organize other assets and don't want to mix my photos in with that, unless there's some way to have two entirely separate libraries with separate keywords/collections/etc.)

 

[ArkieBiker]

I was just looking too. I couldn't find anything.

 

[robgendreau]

Maybe you could run a separate instance of Bridge; there was an app that managed separate prefs files, but I'm gonna guess setting up Bridge that way might be tough. I use either filters or hierarchical keywords so I can ignore all the PDFs say when I'm using Bridge and just wanna deal with photos, but I don't have a lot of collections, since I prefer to use keywords or temp collections. So I see your point. But you could still use it to import into dated folders, and to keyword them.

And obviously Lightroom does all you want. You could use Lr for free even after the trial period ends, except for adjusting and maps, and just send stuff to Ps for adjustment. You have collection sets, which makes it easier to manage collections. And you can save filters presets, unlike Bridge. There's a very handy pluging (Any Filter) which makes it super fast to create a filter for say all "october" images from when time began, or all Christmas Days.

 

[ChrisA]

It seems to me that Adobe Lightroom will do everything you want.

Even Apple Photos too. If you need to be able to edit a specific photo in PS then Photos now can do this. It will make it easy to round trip a photo to a 3rd party editor.

But over all LR does everything on your list and a lot more.

 

[porcupine8]

Ah, I did not realize that most of Lightroom's features keep working after the trial ends! Thanks, I will try it. I've also discovered that XnViewMP does everything I'd want Pixa for, but it's open source so it's pretty clunky. If I can use Lightroom I'm sure it'd work a lot better.