Need a Photo Organizer software for Mac

[fz6yamaha]

Hi All,
Great forum, great information, I was wondering if you could help me out, I am the IT guy at a Newspaper, The photographer and I are in search of an application that would allows to do this:

Add Metadata to the photos, so we can do search by words or any other tag we may like to add.
Organize the photos somehow.
Get the capability of doing advanced search when looking for photos.

This is what is happening right now: We have all the photos storaged into our fileserver, photographer has created all folders by categories and whatever he thinks is convenient but within each folder there is hundreads of pictures, so the category thing does not really help sometimes, it would be great if we could have something like the clipart.com web page, something that is organized by categories and also you can do word searches.

Is there something like that out there, for mac by the way. We have photoshop, Iphoto and I have been working with JetPhoto, Photonator and some other things but none of them cut the trick for what we need. We do not actually need it web based, we just need a software that allows to add more information to the pictures so we can do advanced search in the feature. I do know that we can add keywords in photoshop but what can we use to searches using this information.

 

[Big Mike]

Welcome to the forum.

Google's Picasa is actually pretty good (from what I've seen) for cataloging and quickly searching images.
Plus, it's a free download.

I've seen a preview version of Adobe Album, which might be something to consider. I'm sure there are many other, the key is finding one that works for you.

 

[DWS]

have you checked into Apple's Aperture 2?

 

[usayit]

Picasa is not MAC friendly.

Warning about Aperture2, doesn't support all AGP based graphics cards that shipped with many G5s.


iPhoto gets good feedback... what version are you using? What about it does not fit your needs?

 

[Ptyler22]

iPhoto gets good feedback... what version are you using? What about it does not fit your needs?

Actually iphoto gets horrible feedback, and it sucks, it's really slow and I would hardly say it has editing capabilities, and those that it can do, it messes up.

I am in the same boat, looking for something to replace iphoto because it freezes up my whole computer when it finally opens. I haven't found anything yet but if I do, I'll post it here

 

[usayit]

Perhaps I'm looking in the wrong areas.... most of the reviews I see on iPhoto 8 are not bad. Versions prior to 6 had major issues including hangs. As for editing purposes, obviously it isn't going to compete with Aperture, Lightroom, or Capture one. Then again those three are 2-3x the cost. Its a consumer level product... so perhaps you two are pushing above its intention.

I am using iphoto 6 as a browsing mechanism. Most of my photos are still managed manually via a simply system of folders. Majority of my workflow is done in Capture One v4 which has very limited organizing capabilities.

I am currently evaluating the recently released Lightroom 2. You guys should check it out... I've spent most of my time in the "develop" side of the product but the "library" side has a lot of what you might be looking for: Folder/import management, collections creation (filtering), Keyword tagging, metadata editing, metadata syncing, metadata presets.

I personally have not been to happy with the performance of Aperture (tested on a friends laptop). I haven't tried aperture 2 yet but they don't support my video card.. bummer.

[edit]
OP said that searching was important. Just clicked around in lightroom 2 library and there is a searching mechanism by Attribute, MEtadata, and text. Text has a pull down that allows you to select all, filename, copy name, title, caption, keyword, searchable metadata, searchable IPTC, searchable EXIF, any searchable plug-in field. Just FYI.

 

[chrisburke]

LightRoom is what you need aperture sucks

 

[Sandspur]

Adobe has just released Lightroom 2. Here's a place to learn more:

http://macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/18014/

 

[Ptyler22]

Perhaps I'm looking in the wrong areas.... most of the reviews I see on iPhoto 8 are not bad. Versions prior to 6 had major issues including hangs. As for editing purposes, obviously it isn't going to compete with Aperture, Lightroom, or Capture one. Then again those three are 2-3x the cost. Its a consumer level product... so perhaps you two are pushing above its intention.

I am using iphoto 6 as a browsing mechanism. Most of my photos are still managed manually via a simply system of folders. Majority of my workflow is done in Capture One v4 which has very limited organizing capabilities.

I am currently evaluating the recently released Lightroom 2. You guys should check it out... I've spent most of my time in the "develop" side of the product but the "library" side has a lot of what you might be looking for: Folder/import management, collections creation (filtering), Keyword tagging, metadata editing, metadata syncing, metadata presets.

I personally have not been to happy with the performance of Aperture (tested on a friends laptop). I haven't tried aperture 2 yet but they don't support my video card.. bummer.

[edit]
OP said that searching was important. Just clicked around in lightroom 2 library and there is a searching mechanism by Attribute, MEtadata, and text. Text has a pull down that allows you to select all, filename, copy name, title, caption, keyword, searchable metadata, searchable IPTC, searchable EXIF, any searchable plug-in field. Just FYI.

Yes sorry, I am using iPhoto 6, I thought the most recent release was 7.1? I tried to update it but, no luck, I also downloaded iPhoto buddy, which helps so that you can open one folder at a time rather than opening all the pictures at once.

 

[kcon]

anyone know the purpose of adobe bridge?

 

[chrisburke]

anyone know the purpose of adobe bridge?

well not really much purpose now... there once was a time even when cs3 first came out, that you couldnt open RAW images in photoshop... bridge did a conversion with them so you could open them in photoshop... but now photoshop allows raw...

at least thats my understanding of what bridge was for..

 

[elemental]

If this is for professional use, spend the money on professional software. Lightroom has streamlined my digital photography more than I could imagine- in addition to great tagging and organizing, it has the quickest and most intuitive set of editing controls I've seen. You can download a trial from Adobe.

 

[DWS]

I definitely agree on pro use/pro software.....I have not used LR, but do use Aperture 2, and it is very good IMO from an organizational and editing standpoint....

 

[three_eyed_otter]

+1 for Lightroom...

have a good one
3Eo

 

[Warren_G]

I gotta disagree on iPhoto. Its true that its not the best image editor, but for cataloging a large photo library, and ease of use it cant be beat. I love that you can create events, easily set the key photo, and put in titles, descriptions, metadata, etc with almost no editing skills required.

As the original question was about organizing and not editing, iPhoto is a strong contender IMHO