Managing photographs without importing them?

[Linuxpro]

I must be overlooking something. I have several thousand photographs on an external hard drive. I can view them, and do limited editing with the built in viewer app. It will do if I must live with it.

Yes I killed spotlight so it does not spend 30 min indexing the drive (good advice that I learned on here).

I discovered that iPhoto is stunbborn. It requires that I import the photographs before I can touch them.

I was looking forward to the new photo app (included with IOS-X 10.10.3) that installed this morning. Sadly, it has the same problem.

I want to edit photos from any abitrary source at any time.

Is there a simple fix, or must I purchase a third party app like Adobe to have something that works more like GIMP or Microsoft Photo Editor?

Thanx

 

[sum yung guy]

This is the MacBook Air hardware forum, you should post in Mac Applications.

You're not overlooking anything. iPhoto/Photos is not a photo editor like Photoshop and so on. It's primarily a photo organizer / library application, with some built-in editing. If you don't want that, don't use it.

Why not just use GIMP? Works great on Mac. Pixelmator is also good, costs $30.

It's possible to import photos without copying them inside the Photos Library file, i.e., they will stay where the are on your drive. Uncheck "Copy items to the Photos library" in preferences. But that's probably not what you want. When you edit photos in iPhoto/Photos, the changes are non-destructive. That means if you open the original in another app, you won't see your edits. You have to export them from Photos.

 

[26139]

Lightroom

You want a photo editor, like Photoshop or maybe Lightroom.

 

[jdechko]

Have you tried something like Picasa? It works similarly to Photos/iPhoto in that it will present you with a long scrolling list of thumbnails, but it does an import without touching file locations. Also, unlike Photos, it can be configured to watch a specific folder (or set of folders) for new images. It allows for simple edits right in the app, and I think editing in an external program is just a right-click away.

It's possible to import photos without copying them inside the Photos Library file, i.e., they will stay where the are on your drive. Uncheck "Copy items to the Photos library" in preferences. But that's probably not what you want. When you edit photos in iPhoto/Photos, the changes are non-destructive. That means if you open the original in another app, you won't see your edits. You have to export them from Photos.

This is possible, but it still generates thumbnails inside the Photos library and sometimes those thumbnails can take up as much space as the photos themselves. This is what I found in my experimentation, anyway.

 

[Linuxpro]

I see. Thanx all. I will try GIMP for Mac first.

 

[Linuxpro]

My apologies for using the wrong forum.

The display hardware is pretty awesome. I think the pictures look really good compared to Dell, and others.