Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Mac People: Photo management software?

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!

Whenever I import photos (from the camera) it creates a new event. You may try importing your folders one (or a group) at a time. That would of course require re-importing everything. Another thing to check out is, at the bottom of the Events menu there's an option to "Autosplit selected events". Then you can re-merge them based on your own criteria. (Merging is easy - drag & drop).

In response to the new laptop being "so cool".... no comment

-signed, a PC guy...

If you know and like Picasa, there's no reason not to use it; however, iPhoto isn't too difficult to get your head around, and the advantage of using it is that it seamlessly ties in to all your other Apple media apps (iDVD, iMovie, etc.)

Oh, and congrats on taking the Mac leap.

I can't wean myself off the PC teat either.

signed,

The fat guy on the apple commercial

I completely switched to Mac about 5 years ago. I'm also considering the new 13" Macbook since my buddy can help w/ the educational discount.

That being said, I agree that iPhoto can be mind numbingly confusing. Honestly, w/ my photo library, I manually manage it on 2 network drives (Time Capsule and USB HDD on another Airport Extreme), similar to you mentioned. The problem w/ iPhoto (similar to iTunes) is that it can sometimes do too much. If you let it organize your photos, your directory structure will be complete obliterated and you'll never get it back to it's original state. I had a similar problem w/ iTunes and thousands of pre-organized MP3 files. I've had to get over that over the course of several years... My STRONG recommendation before you attempt to use another photo organization too, back up your photo library to another HDD to preserve your directory structure. That way you'll have a recovery method if you don't like what iPhoto (or similar) will do to it.

Now I haven't had a chance to use iLife 09 yet. There's a bunch of cool features there but frankly it's only installed on a Hackintosh that isn't powerful enough for all the features of iPhoto 09. But it might be worth checking out.

Another thing to consider is an off site backup of photos. I am one of those victims you hear about, who lost a bunch of photos from an HDD crash. I was moving files between my 2 backups and my photo archive drive crashed. (The drive is currently unrecoverable sans an $$$ service.) I have backups on various websites but it's a pain. Now I use something called JungleDisk. I love it because I have 13GB of photos backed up at Amazon for about $2.50/mo. Not bad IMHO and I don't even have to manage any of it.

http://jungledisk.com/

Gotta admit, my MBP 17" is a couple years old and, at 140 deg F, "cool" is not how I'd describe it. If you ever run Faces in iPhoto, crack an egg on that baby and it's breakfast time.

oh, and oldskoolboarder, a WD MyBook and Time Machine help alot.

I know, I know. I feel like a dirty traitor for buying a Mac. If it makes you feel any better, some of my Windows-centric coworkers think I'm a leper now.

I'm getting over it.

And the Microsoft-haters (the Unix/Linux/Novell guys) are all thrilled that I might be 'playing for the other team' now.

Thanks for the tips. I don't know if I could stand taking the time to import hundreds of folders individually. But I didn't know about the auto-Event feature. That may solve my problem.

And yes, the seamless integration between apps is pretty amazing. I like it.

As I was importing the 15k photos, it did start to heat up - lots of processor & disk I/O. The fan kicked on. And yes, since it's aluminum, the heat spreads. So yeah, it got hot as I was pushing it.

But it's no worse than the Dell notebook (Core2Duo) that it was replacing. In fact, when I wasn't pushing it (and using the 9400M video rather than the 9600GT), the MBP stays cooler than the Dell.

Neither are truly lap-friendly laptops.

Thanks for the tips, OldSkool. Yes, your impressions mirror mine. I currently keep three sets of all of my music & photos. A working set on my 'main' machine, a copy on my home NAS, and a third on a USB drive. I will probably start using the USB HD for Time Machine, once I'm settled on the MBP.