Photo browsing on a MAC

[images_in_light_north_west]

<p>Who makes a good software for browsing photos on a MAC ?</p>

<p>Thanks Ross</p>

[vrankin]

<p>For starters, Apple does... with Aperture.</p>

[howard_m]

<p>are you looking to just 'browse' or are you looking for a photo management (and possibly some editing features) application?</p>

[richsimmons]

<p>Preview is built into the Mac and you can highlight all the photos you want and then open them all at once with Preview. Might take a little bit to load depending on the size of your photos, but this will work. Other than that you have Bridge from Adobe, iPhoto which probably came with your Mac too.</p>

[andylynn]

<p>There's iPhoto, and Aperture (which you might call "iPhoto Pro"). Lightroom has similar functionality to Aperture. If you don't want to have a library but just browse a disk of photos, go to it in Finder and put the Finder window in CoverFlow mode. To get a larger view of a photo, click it and press the space bar. Double-click will open it in Preview, and if you open Preview's Sidebar you can drag multiple photos in to the Sidebar and the see them as a slideshow.</p>

[images_in_light_north_west]

<p>Just got back, Iphoto and preview are both garbage as far as I am concerned, I have CS3 and Lightroom, I just want to be able to quickly brows photos that I have already worked in LR so I can make my final choice to send to CS3, on a PC I used ACDsee which worked great, no draging and dropping, just open and view a folder, does Aperture allow viewing only ? may try a free trial, ACDsee is coming to MAC from what I hear, but it may be a while.<br>

Ross</p>

[godfrey]

<p>Use LR for that. </p>

[Brad_]

<p>>>> ... I just want to be able to quickly brows photos that I have already worked in LR so I can make my final choice to send to CS3, ...</p>

<p>???</p>

<p>If you've already worked them in LR, then just save them as a "Pick" (letter P) and then filter by that. Or drag them to a collection...</p>

<p>After you've done either of the above, press "G" to view/browse in Grid mode in the Library. Adjust the image size slider to taste...</p>

[charlie_basset1]

<p>Ross, I've done a lot of shopping on this topic myself and the fastest, easiest and cheapest way to BROWSE photos is by far <a href="http://www.camerabits.com/site/index.html">Photomechnic.</a><br>

<br /> What's amazing about PM is that it is so damn fast at loading photos. You do not have to wait for the time it takes for a photo or directory of photos to load into memory. I don't know how they do it, but when I choose a directory to open into a Contact Sheet (what they call it), the whole full resolution directory will virtually load and be ready to browse within 3 - 5 seconds. When I was doing photojournalism more regularly, I had a hard time working without it it. Not only does it let you browse, but very much like Lightroom, it lets you caption, Tag for editing, rate, sort, rename... pretty much anything you will need to do to a photo except image rendering (that's what you'll have Photoshop and Lightroom for)</p>

[godfrey]

<p>as <em>Brad -</em> said:<br /> <em>If you've already worked them in LR, then just save them as a "Pick" (letter P) and then filter by that. Or drag them to a collection... <br /><br /> After you've done either of the above, press "G" to view/browse in Grid mode in the Library. Adjust the image size slider to taste...</em><br /> <br /> Exactly what I do. Why look for another application to finish the sorting process when you've already got all the tools you need?</p>

[images_in_light_north_west]

<p>Charlie, sounds like you know what I'm talking about, Lightroom is not a good browser, its a great tool but for browsing it lacks. I will take a look at Photomechanic and for those using iphoto you really owe it to yourselfs to try some thing different. Try the ACDsee for MAC when it comes out.<br>

Thanks, Ross</p>

[andylynn]

<p>I don't get it. You have Lightroom. It sorts and browses and has round-trip to Photoshop built in. Why would you want more software?</p>

[images_in_light_north_west]

<p>Andrew, its hard to explain but if you saw how acdsee worked maybe you would understand, it is fast, way faster than LR or CS3 and I mean way faster and you dont have to import you can just open the program and flip through any image on your computer by folder, then you dont have to go fish for an image, I export my images to a seperate folder with in the folder from the shoot, so I can open it and just scroll through images I want to send to CS3, this is my workflow and it works well for me. When ACDsee release the MAC version try the free down load and you will understand.<br>

Charlie, can you scroll through images with in a single folder with PM ? and then select any other folder with out hassels ?<br>

Ross</p>

[andylynn]

<p>I have ACDSee on my PC, been using it for years. It's good for browsing folders of images on disks that aren't part off my own library.</p>

<p>I guess I just don't understand your organization, it sounded like you've already got the photos in LR. Personally I'm pretty well hooked on Aperture for my own library and for photos not in my library a combination of the CoverFlow view and Quick Look works very well - have you tried that? I use the bottom part of the Finder window to expand and contract folders, whatever I click comes up on the top part and two finger scroll left and right flips through photos. Space bar pulls up large view. I find it nearly as fast as ACDSee. It even works on NEF and PSD files, and Quick Look works on a bunch of files ACDSee doesn't like, like PDFs and documents.</p>

[images_in_light_north_west]

<p>Thanks Andrew, I do have them in lightroom but you cant see final sharpening, LR is not a good browser, I have thousands of images and don't want to import them all, I may try a download of Aperure and try it out, not familier with Quick Look and CoverFlow, will look in to it. Ross</p>

[charlie_basset1]

<p>Ross, yes, to answer your question. When you open the folder in Photomechanic, you can either use the arrow bar at the top of the screen to scroll through the images or you can use the arrow keys on your keyboard. You can work with individual photos, but PM really speeds up scrolling through photos in a directory or folder. And you can open up MULTIPLE folders and move to and from each one with one click. In the most recent version (4.6), they use tabbed browsing for each folder, like in Firefox when you have multiple websites open. Also, if you want to look closely at a particular photo for say, sharpness, all you do is double click on it and it expands to almost full screen view INSTANTLY. Can also do side by side comparison as well. To come out of that "full" screen mode, just click the red circle on your Mac and it brings you back to the contact sheet. <br /> What I like about it is that it also has a Slide Show feature that I use for editing photos in a series so I can choose the best amongst a group of similar shots.</p>

<p>Realize everyone, if you have Lightroom or Aperture, you may be saying "Big Deal, Aperture has always done that and so does Lightroom", but you have to realize that Photomechanic was out there even before Aperture came on the market. Photomechanic is not trying to compete with Aperture or Lightroom, they are specializing specifically in Photo Browsing, captioning, keywording, (also serves as an FTP client too) etc... and then some. That's what the program does. I can recaption and keyword 500 photos with minimal keystrokes and is complete in 10 seconds after I click "apply to selected photos".</p>

<p>Ross do a Google search on "Lightroom vs. Photomechanic" and it'll highlight the differences between the two. Photomechanic is even faster than ACDSee b/c ACDSee is "similar" to Lightroom where the images are kind-of loaded into memory and "catalogued" which takes up CPU. The thing I like about ACDSee (when I used PC) is it's ability to Batch Resize images to specific pixel sizes with JPEG compression ratio adjustability. I just posted a question on this yesterday on this a few above yours and got a wonderful response. Hey, call Photomechanic sales and the people there are really nice and will answer any of your questions. they're in Oregon so give them time to get to work ;-)</p>

[images_in_light_north_west]

<p>Charlie, I just downloaded PM, wow is it fast, this may do the job, problem though, in folder view on the right my external hard drive doesn't show up.<br>

Ross</p>

[images_in_light_north_west]

<p>Ok, just a slight glitch, found the external drive, I like PM the more I use it, reminds me a bit of ACDsee</p>

<p>Thanks Charlie.<br>

Ross</p>

[peter_lawrence]

<p>I will also heartily recommend Photo Mechanic as the best photo browser available for the Mac. I use it to do the initial import of my photo images into my Mac. It's superior in that regard to both Aperture and Lightroom because it gives you a lot of flexibility on how to rename you images on your hard drive, in addition to its speed and ease for adding keywords and IPTC metadata to your images.</p>

<p>Also by using Photo Mechanic first, one can delete rejects quickly and only import into Lightroom (or Aperture) the images that made the initial cut. Thus saving more time and disk drive space.</p>

<p>I use Photo Mechanic in conjunction with Lightroom. They work well together.</p>