by Linus Kleen
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I am looking for a photo manager that would be clean and simple and most importantly, would allow me to simply browse directories on my drive and view photos there directly without the concept of "Libraries" and having to import images into the application. I absolutely HATE dealing with libraries, and my preference is to just open the application that shows me a tree of my drive where I can navigate through different folders. Any good apps for Mac? |
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I recommend Lightroom. Wait. Doesn't Lightroom use a Library? Yes, Lightroom uses a Library, but perhaps not in the way you think. Lightroom actually uses the directory structure you define, and will use it happily. In fact, it won't even touch your photos. It will publish to the directories as well. You can browse, tweak and yes, delete photos within your directory. Lightroom uses a library to hold the edits and metadata for your images. The actual images are not stored in the library. Edits and metadata can be written to the image, to a new image, or to XMP sidecar files, depending on what you prefer. Lightroom has superior image management capabilities, zero touch photo editing, and will allow you to manage the files exactly where they are, in directories of your own choosing. During the Lightroom Import process, Lightroom will even copy your originals to the directory of your choosing, because it doesn't put images in the library. Lightroom does import, but it is not importing or even moving your images, it is simply importing the data about your image, and creating on-screen previews to aid in editing. |
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You can also look at Capture One. This doesn't use libraries and is considered to be one of the best RAW converters out there. It does create a lot of files and folders for all the associated meta data however. I have CaptureOne Express 6 which is pretty good and cheap too, but hardly use it as I prefer Lightroom 4. |
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Xee, GraphicConverter, etc., are all good options. Since those are covered, I'll mention PhotoReviewer.app -- it's written by the guy who made "Solarian 2" back in the day, when he was tinkering around with MacOSX programming. I don't believe it's actively updated, but it's worked for me in the past when I wanted a quick browse. |
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I love libraries (Lightroom is my favourite) but sometimes I just need to quickly view a couple of pictures in a directory. I use Xee for this purpose. No imports, no need to select images to view, simple navigation, a bunch of supported formats.
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Also check out Adobe Bridge. By the way, library-less photo managers usually are called photo/image browsers. |
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Sounds like you are looking for GraphicConverter. This has been around for eons, and was very popular before library-based photo managers became popular. It is still updated (64-bit support, raw...). However, I have not used it myself for years. |
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You didn't mention which version of OS X you have, it's probably relevant. RawTherapee is a pretty good editor/browser/manager as you describe. It's usually a little bit behind on the Mac build and it's only 32-bit there, but if you're able to compile your own, then you could build 64-bit since it's open source. As mentioned, Adobe Bridge also does this, but then you're buying Photoshop and that's not so cheap. Having said that, it works very well, does batch (including batching through Photoshop when you want stuff from there), and is 64-bit. There's also DxO Optics Pro that can work in what they call "File Mode" which is filesystem based. DxO is pretty well known for their imaging work, but I haven't used their software being a Photoshop user. My thoughts would be to try and get RawTherapee going, it's a very good piece of software. Failing that, I'd probably go with the DxO package as it's significantly cheaper. Note, you can also download and try the DxO first. |
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