I have just abdicated from XP to MAC ! after years of dissatisfaction Frustration and many broken items in my flat.....I like using MAGIX PHOTO MANAGER to view my photos ....its fantastic i love the ZOOM effect.. it has ,,also the RED EYE REPAIR TOOL and all the other bumf that it provides ..does anyone have any suggestions as to what photo manager to use in mac...... if anyone knows this program they may something similar ...thank you
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Photo Manager For Mac
- Thread starter w84itm8
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
I used Picasa on my Windows machines, and have done the same on my Mac. I love the layout and ease of use. I tried iPhoto, but I hated how it made its own library and basically doubled the size of your photo collection. With Picasa, I can leave my photos in their original location and have the application scan for changes and automatically import them.
yeah but if you use iPhoto as your main photo manager... it will import your photos directly to it's database, which eliminates the need for random folders all over your hard drive.
in a sense, if you are still doing that then picasa isn't managing your photos - it's just providing a GUI for them
That's true, but I prefer it that way. I prefer to organize the folders myself, and just have an interface for working with them. Now that I have doubled the amount of hard drive space on my machine, perhaps I'll give iPhoto another chance and see just what it can do. I have this crazy fear of importing everything into iPhoto and then deleting the originals. But I guess that's what backups and external drives are for.
you shouldn't be afraid of that. it's the same thing as iTunes organizing your music collection
If you do not check the Advanced Preference box for "Copy items to the iPhoto Library" then iPhoto will show a thumbnail shortcut to original stored outside of iPhoto.
The original must stay in it's original place or iPhoto won't be able to find it whereas if box is selected then picture is copied to iPhoto database and original can be deleted but photo is now buried in layers of folders in database. Better to use one or the other option so not to get confused and start deleting originals thinking they are stored in iPhoto.
I like my pictures to stay in their folder I put them in so don't check this box.
I, like the OP, would also like a true photo browser but it doesn't exist for the Mac. The closest is Adobe's Bridge but with that it uses a different user selectable App to actually open and view photo.
If you just drop your photos into your Pictures folder, what difference does it make? I actually prefer Picasa over iPhoto because of that. It shows me images in the Pictures folder, but then also will show images that may be apart of a separate project elsewhere.
I love the Image Viewer that's built into Windows, but was disappointed when I discovered that Preview didn't work that way. In Windows, you could click on one photo in a folder and then browse all of the other photos as well. Unless I haven't dug deep enough into Preview, you have to select all of the photos and then open Preview. Not a big deal or anything, just one of those minor differences that I'm having to learn between the two systems.
Lightroom
If you're serious about photography, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 is definitely the best photo management software on the market. A little expensive, though, which is why I said "if you're serious".
http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshoplightroom/
If you're serious about photography, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 is definitely the best photo management software on the market. A little expensive, though, which is why I said "if you're serious".
http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshoplightroom/
A couple of misconceptions about iPhoto is that it "doubles" the amount of space used up on your hard drive, and that it uses a proprietary "database" to store the photos.
The Pictures/iPhoto Library is just a folder with a special tag that tells the OS X GUI to display it as a file. If you right click and select "Show Package Contents" you'll see the various folders that iPhoto actually uses. You can also drill down into it from Terminal using the standard cd command. This means the folder is accessible to any other application that needs access.
In that folder, there's an "Originals" sub folder that contains the images as they are when you import them into iPhoto. When you make a modification to one of these images, iPhoto creates a copy and makes the changes to it. That way you can always go back to your original. Since only edited images have copies, the drive space is larger than it would be but is not doubled. Having the originals more than makes up for this increased disk space usage.
I know that some people like have full control of where they keep their stuff on hard drive, but that attitude is so old school as to be obsolete these days. With graphical front ends and file tagging, there's no need to know that my daughter's third birthday party photos are in ~/Pictures/iPhoto Library/Originals/2005/birthday/ - I just open iPhoto and search for the keywords.
The Pictures/iPhoto Library is just a folder with a special tag that tells the OS X GUI to display it as a file. If you right click and select "Show Package Contents" you'll see the various folders that iPhoto actually uses. You can also drill down into it from Terminal using the standard cd command. This means the folder is accessible to any other application that needs access.
In that folder, there's an "Originals" sub folder that contains the images as they are when you import them into iPhoto. When you make a modification to one of these images, iPhoto creates a copy and makes the changes to it. That way you can always go back to your original. Since only edited images have copies, the drive space is larger than it would be but is not doubled. Having the originals more than makes up for this increased disk space usage.
I know that some people like have full control of where they keep their stuff on hard drive, but that attitude is so old school as to be obsolete these days. With graphical front ends and file tagging, there's no need to know that my daughter's third birthday party photos are in ~/Pictures/iPhoto Library/Originals/2005/birthday/ - I just open iPhoto and search for the keywords.
Old habits die hard for some people. I was hesitant to let go of control, but I find that a spend more time taking and enjoying my photos - or making slideshows, than I do organizing them.
You shouldn't spend more time on the files and folders than you do on the photos.
So you two guys who think that those of us who manually organize our photos are old school - how do you store and import your photos? I assume that originally you had a gang of pictures in your Photos folder and then imported them into iPhoto. Did you delete them from their original location or keep them on the hard drive? Also, when you add new photos, do you just let iPhoto grab them and catalog them as it pleases?
My main concern with iPhoto is that I don't run a strictly Mac network, so I keep things in folders in order to copy them neatly to a home server, external hard drives and/or Windows machines, depending on the situation. But you say that you can drill down into the iPhoto library and dig up the original folders if necessary? Does that mean that I can just drill down and copy the folders to external devices from there? If so, that's great and I may just have to give iPhoto another try.
My main concern with iPhoto is that I don't run a strictly Mac network, so I keep things in folders in order to copy them neatly to a home server, external hard drives and/or Windows machines, depending on the situation. But you say that you can drill down into the iPhoto library and dig up the original folders if necessary? Does that mean that I can just drill down and copy the folders to external devices from there? If so, that's great and I may just have to give iPhoto another try.
I imported everything to iPhoto from an external. Disconnected it to ensure the photos were all there, and then deleted them from it. For new photos, I just let iPhoto import them. It handles all the files. I just worry about the pictures
Messing around in the library has caused corruption in iPhoto '08, I don't know if they fixed it in '09, but it should be avoided whenever possible.
Makes sense. I think I'd still have to copy my pictures to an external drive or server just for safe keeping, but I think I could definitely live without the folder structure I currently have on my Mac. I can lose a lot of things, but my photo collection isn't one of them, and I'm not that comfortable with keeping it all on one machine.