I've been a Mac convert for a little while now, but one of my biggest frustrations is using iPhoto or aperture for my photo management. It's one of the things windows did so much better: picture uploads were simple, it knew which pictures had/had not been uploaded, and the default photo viewer made it so easy to cycle through pictures. Mac photo viewer sucks. iPhoto and Aperture are bloatware at best, and their "library" files, even if I select the option to store the actual photos elsewhere, seem to grow exponentially (mine's 40gb already) and slow everything to a crawl. So Mac users, what are some good options for photo management? Free is ideal, though I'd pay a little for something really good. Has to run well on a relatively bare-bikes Mac mini.
I use photo mechanic for renaming, sorting, editing, and captioning, it was originally designed for photojournalists and sports photographers working on deadline. It's fast, even with raw images. I have been using it for 13-14 years, All images are captioned and some get key worded. This is all done in photo mechanic. It isn't a photo management or photo editing software though. I keep everything in dated folders, if they're captioned and or key worded it's easy enough to find them. I shoot about 80-100 GB of images a year. ACDSEE has always gotten good reviews in the past, don't know how it is currently. http://www.acdsee.com/en/products/acdsee-pro-3-mac Personally I want by management software to do that, I don't want a do all software that ends up being good at nothing.
I don't consider Bridge as photo management software. Wish MerlinOne was in my budget, it is what we use at work.
