Since it's an established fact that we have someone here that knows something about everything, I thought I'd ask.
I finally jumped off the bridge and bought a Mac.
To make a long story very short, my wife is 100% Mac at her job, and enjoys it so much we bought her a Macbook Air for Christmas to replace her old Dell notebook. She loves it. And I 'borrow' it frequently. It's utterly fantastic, and I've found myself actually quite liking the whole OS X experience. So when my Dell notebook started acting up a couple of months ago, I started laptop shopping. And a few days ago, I decided to shake things up and buy myself a Macbook Pro instead. Variety is the spice of life, ya know.
After a week of tinkering, I can honestly say that I'm quite impressed with it. I like it, and am starting to get the hang of how to do things. But I'm in the unusual situation (for me) of being a 'newbie', as 20 years of Microsoft conditioning makes me want to do things a certain way. But I'm extremely impressed at how well it's working in general. Very cool.
Though I will admit, due to a couple of games, I can't completely wean myself off the Microsoft teat.
One of the first things I did was to get XP up and running under Bootcamp. Super cool. I've done dual-boot Windows/Linux setups before, so the concept isn't new to me. But it's still cool. And working flawlessly. I've never seen XP run so quickly.
But anyway, I have one lingering question.
For other Mac people, what do you use to manage & edit your photos? I have about 15,000 photos from the past 8 years. All organized into folders; 'Summer Vacation 2008 - Day 2', 'Christmas 2007', etc. Up until now, I've managed them with Picasa.
I'm trying to use/learn iPhoto '09.
It's pretty good, but I have some problems with how it wants to organize my photos. Basically, it won't let me see & browse my photos by folder like I'm used to. I discovered the popular option of unchecking the 'Copy photos to iPhoto library'. That helps in that it's at least not sucking away all my photos into some mysterious iPhoto library. But it still wants to put all 15k photos into one gigantic 'Event'. Uh, no.
Is there any way to make iPhoto '09 translate a folder structure into 'Events'?
I'm also thinking about my other options. I haven't tried Picasa for the Mac yet but I intend to, as it's been great on the PC.
Does anyone here use Aperture, Lightroom, or Photoshop to import & manage their photos on a Mac? Was it worth it? I can get LR2.0 or PS CS4 for steep discounts from the university where my wife works, so either are a realistic option. I like the look of LR, as I don't think I quite need the 'firepower' that PS brings to the table. Thoughts? Aperture looks cool too, but I can't get a discount on it, and I could get the entire CS4 Suite for about the same cost as Aperture @ MSRP.
Thanks friends!
