What are some other ways you can store photos on Mac away from iPhoto ?
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Brendan
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Best Ways To Store Photos On Mac?
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The best way is probably using iPhoto. You get to assign titles, tags, locations and faces to each photo. Then you get to organize them into albums as well. Printing, ordering albums, slideshows, etc.
Is there any reason why you don't want to use iPhoto?
Other methods I can think of include:
Aperture: The more professional-grade photo software from Apple.
Lightroom: Software from Adobe.
Picasa: Haven't tried using Picasa's client software, but I hear this free software does a good job.
Finder: Just put your photos in folders. You don't get much in the way of organization or labeling, but it is simple.
If I might piggyback on to this question: If I have photos in my "Pictures" folder and then I let iPhoto build a library do I get duplicate photos? In other words do I have my original photo in the "Pictures" folder and then another copy in the photo library folder structure?
One of the reasons I ask this is because I have recently moved all of my photos on to my Mac. Due to the way these photos were moved around in the past I have many duplicates. I'm going through, one by one, in the Finder and deleting the dupes. I'm wondering if I deleting these dupes somehow also deletes the photos out of the library.
I hope this made sense. :)
Yes. If you import them into iPhoto, then it copies them all into your iPhoto library. So, technically you would have two copies of them then.
But the original files and the ones in the iPhoto library should be separate. But easy for you to see for yourself. Delete one of the files, and then look in your iPhoto library.
Indeed iPhoto always stores photo's managed in its library. You can see this if you go via the finder to the library and use the option to show the contents of it. Then you will notice it has a deep nested folder structure and you will find the photo's in there somehow. Keep in mind that it is not really adviced to mess with this structure.
iPhoto will never change the original photo you imported. All changes you make on the picture will be kept in a separte file. So you can always revert back to the original imported photo.
If you have a lot of photo's it might be wise to get Aperture3. The 3 biggest differences with iPhoto are:
1) Aperture can import photo's in it's lib in a reference way. Meaning the photo's stay on your drive in the original location and it is not copied into the library. This is better because then the Aperture lib is staying smaller. For instance when you need to restore a copy (Timemachine) than this will be much faster when not all photo's are included. And second this even allows for you photo's to be located on another drive just as well.
2) Aperture3 has RAW capabilities. For more serious photographers this allows you to change the RAW conversion. In iPhoto always the Apple default RAW conversion is used when you insert a RAW photo in the lib.
3) Aperture3 can work with multiple libraries. So depending on the picture you make, you can have indenpent libraries. I for instance have one for personal use, another one for the dance school from my girls. And a third one to store projects I do for other people.
Keep in mind that changes to a photo are not stored in the original photo by iPhoto or Aperture. These applications will store the changes in a separate document (rather a list of the changes). Then they generate a version of the photo (start from original and then perform the list of changes) and this is the version you will see when using the application. This version is often smaller than the resolution of the photo too keep the library small and to allow faster processing. So this also means that if you would like access to your pictures via the finder that the only option is the export these versions (with max resolution) into a new folder.