Comments on: Looking for a Photo Organizer/Editor

By: Antonio

Antonio — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 23:15:56 +0000

And it seems it’s integrated with Google Maps, so you can even associate your photos with geo-locations (probably good for bird sightings?).

By: Antonio

Antonio — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 23:10:34 +0000

So what about bluemarine?
http://bluemarine.tidalwave.it/

I haven’t used it myself, but it’s open source and you can always ask Fabrizio for extra features.

By: Bennett

Bennett — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 21:10:47 +0000

Picasa for Mac could fit the bill. It fulfils most of your criteria, but I don’t know how it handles RAW files or very large (100,000+) photo libraries. It’s still in beta too, so stability could be an issue, though I don’t know if this is a real beta or a GMail-style perpetual beta.

The main things I don’t like about it are the lack of automatic organising (iPhoto is much better) and the clunky tagging (“photo albums”).

By: Augusto

Augusto — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 17:43:38 +0000

Ah, didn’t realize the Mac version was *that* different.

Album used to be it’s own product;
http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopalbum/index.html

Then it got merged into Photoshop Elements. Still is included in the latest version (for Windows);
http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopelwin/features/

I like the features it has, mainly the tagging and search functionality. Really a shame they didn’t want to port it to the Mac.

By: Elliotte Rusty Harold

Elliotte Rusty Harold — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 16:28:00 +0000

OK. Seems the Mac version of Photoshop Elements does not have the Organizer/Album functionality that the PC version does. Very bad move on Adobe’s part. I have no idea what they were thinking: wasting huge amounts of time creating a pixel-perfect cross-platform GUI and then leaving out major functionality on the Mac. Much better to have a mac program that looks like a mac program (like older version of Elements did) and a Windows program that looks like a Windows program, while letting both versions have the same features.

By: Elliotte Rusty Harold

Elliotte Rusty Harold — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 16:14:37 +0000

Augusto, I’m not sure what this Photoshop Album is. I don’t see any such functionality in Elements, but I could well be missing something. (This also explains why I don’t want to move up to even more complex products like full Phootshop or Lightroom.)

By: Dolan Halbrook

Dolan Halbrook — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 02:20:23 +0000

Lightroom 2.1 with Jeffrey Friedl’s export plugins, or the newly released Picasa for OSX are your best bets, AFAIK. I have over 50k (mostly RAW) images in LR and run it on a MacBook Core Duo 2.4 with 4GB RAM. It’s fast enough to be not-painful most of the time; every once in a while you’ll get the spinning beachball of death but not nearly as often as Aperture (relies heavily on a dedicated GPU) or iPhoto (isn’t happy with 50k files).

By: Rob Bender

Rob Bender — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 15:24:59 +0000

When I outgrew iPhoto, I moved to Aperture. It can import iPhoto libraries (either the entire library or a single album at a time). Apple has a 30 day free trial on their website.

By: Romain Guy

Romain Guy — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 09:55:11 +0000

To me, LightRoom 2.0 matches almost all of your requirements. Missing are Smart Fix and iPhoto import.

By: Augusto

Augusto — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 06:25:27 +0000

Did you try that Photoshop Album included in Elements? I don’t even use elements for editing but just for organizing and tagging photos. Wasn’t clear from your message if you had already tried that out.