05-16-2010, 12:44 PM

I just switched from windows to mac. So far its been good till i tried iPhoto.
I like to organize my collections of photos. I HATE how iPhoto reorganize the whole stuff on its own.
I notice the file sizes are different.. Does iPhoto resize photos?

Anyway WHAT i WANT is..... another apps...
Is there any other application that is similar to windows photo gallery in mac?

05-16-2010, 12:55 PM

Maybe you should start by specifying what you want the app. to do and try to understand what the capabilities of iPhoto are.

iPhoto is a great tool ( like there are many others ).

Cheers ... McBie

05-16-2010, 01:42 PM

I'd give iPhoto a shot, watch some tutorials on it. It won't resize your pics so don't worry about that.

It's pretty easy to use and you can alway reorganise your photos the way you want. Plus you have a fairly comprehensive photo editor built-in too.

05-18-2010, 12:45 PM

I can’t think of a better software than iPhoto for organizing and does not have a high learning curve.Pictures can be organized in many different ways. Events can separate pictures or combine pictures into new events, then given unique new names. You can group pictures by using faces, pictures can be tagged with keywords, you can rate your picture with one to five stars and you can easily search and find photos using these criteria.

So you can identify all pictures of a friend, by using faces by name, then further set a criteria by using keywords. So you can do a search using the criteria of friend’s name, then keywords such as Virginia, Christmas and a star rating and every picture that you have keyed with those words will show up.

IPhoto is very powerful for organizing photos. My suggestion is to start using this right now. Waiting until you have thousands of pictures is time consuming and tedious.

Apple has several short tutorials that are very helpful on their web site if you search on ilife then tutorials. Believe me it is an easy program to learn and you will not be disappointed.

One last comment iPhoto doesnot “reorganize the whole stuff on its own.” When you import pictures into iPhoto it organizes pictures into events by date the pictures where taken. It is up to you to organize them in a different manner.

05-18-2010, 04:28 PM

I'm with the OP. iPhoto is the weakest part of iLife.

Try Picasa, free, flexible, fast and no bespoke library package to deal with.

05-19-2010, 09:11 AM

I'm in the "iPhoto sucks" camp as well. I'm old school though, so my recommendation is going to be Finder.

I organize folders like:

Year-->Month/Day/Event Name

And then dump my files into there and use Adobe bridge to browse through the files in the folders.

05-19-2010, 09:25 AM

I agree that iPhoto is awful. Apple should be embarrassed. I have thousands of photos from both work and my personal life, the fact that I can't switch between my work photos and personal family photos without restarting iPhoto is preposterous.

I also tried Aperture 2 & Picasa for Mac. I found both to have overly cluttered interfaces. Too many buttons & options for the single purpose I wanted to use them for--browsing photos.

In the end, I took a que from Microsoft. I created a "My Pictures" folder and stuck everything in there. You can create as many folders and subfolders as you want and organize them any way you like.

The only problem with this method is with the iPhone. Since iTunes doesn't know what a subfolder is, neither does iTunes. So my work and personal photos are once again lumped together in a giant wad on my iPhone, but I can live with that and still be a happy person. If that's my biggest complaint in life, I'm doing ok.

05-19-2010, 10:53 PM

I hear good things about photo mechanic, $150, a demo is available.

At that price you could think about aperture which is what I use.

05-21-2010, 05:10 PM

I'm interested in the following from Jaygray "I created a "My Pictures" folder and stuck everything in there. You can create as many folders and subfolders as you want and organize them any way you like." How do you do this? How do you have the same picture in more than one folder?

I have about 7000 photos on my iMac. I have twin grandsons. I can put all of them in one folder entitled "Twins." But how would you put them in another folder, while keeping the originals in the Twins folder and have another folder that, say, is for their first year and then another third folder that is for the twins first year and specifically their first Christmas.

I use Windows at work, I work with baby pictures, but I don't know how to build three separate folders as I described above without duplicating pictures. i know how to do this in iPhoto but not on my windows machine. Any suggestions? Thanks

05-25-2010, 09:09 PM

I own all the tools IPhoto 09, Photoshop Elements, Aperture 3, Lightroom etc... and I always go back to Adobe Lightroom.

I am now using Adobe Lightroom 3 BEta and it's fantastic, highly recommended!

05-26-2010, 07:50 AM

Yeah, Lightroom. I'm surprised nobody mentioned it until 328iguy. Lightroom is friggin fantastic. Sure, it's more than iLife but it does so much more. Lightroom gets my vote.