I recently moved from working primarily with Linux to working primarily with a Mac. My favorite way to quickly browse through photos in Linux was with Picasa. I liked it because I could quickly flip through photos visually and, more importantly, it saw photos in folders that I set up myself rather than making copies of the photos to use.
I want to find a similar program for my Mac. I started using iPhoto. It fits the first requirement well enough, but it wants to create new copies of my photos in the iPhoto directory and won’t let me access those copies from other programs. I have over 15 thousand photographs on my computer currently, so this is a problem. I have them organized by date and I can generally find the photos I want fairly quickly without any visual cues, but I’d still like them for the times that I’d like to find a set of photos that I know I took in the spring two years ago, but don’t know more information beyond that.
Picasa isn’t currently available for Mac users, so I am hoping that my fellow Dopers can offer some suggestions for me.
I totally understand the limitations you feel with iPhoto; I have 20,000 photos on my hard drive.
You can make smart albums with iPhoto - just set the parameters for date between 01.01.2006 and 06.01.2006 (or whatever dates for spring you want) to get to the set you want.
I am still looking for a fast, free photo resizer for Mac - like Irfanview. Nothing fancy.
During the two months our Mac’s hard drive was at the data recovery service (during which time they were unable to extract any usable data), I turned to my kids’ PC and Picasa for photo organization. I fell in love with it. In fact, I think it’s the only redeemable thing about a PC.
Please, Picasa, please develop a Mac version. Please?!?
Until you do, I have to make do with iPhoto. Which I really liked until I found Picasa, but now find kind of limiting.
iphoto is the closest that comes to mind. However, GraphicConverter seems to be able to do anything with photos. It is shareware.
You can browse folders quite easily. Definitely worth checking out, though it isn’t quite what you are asking for.
There are rumors that Picasa for the Mac is just around the corner. Then again, the previous rumor was that Picasa for the Mac would be out in 2008, so take it with a grain of salt.
Anyone who has never tried GraphicConverter as an alternative to iPhoto is missing out on a nice experience. It’s very versatile but it does not think it is smarter than you are.
I’m no expert on this–I use Xee to browse photos, which I arrange in whatever way I see fit through normal, boring old folders on the drive. But for resizing, wouldn’t GIMP work? It might be hunting gnats with a bazooka, but it’s free and it would get the job done.
I’m not sure if there are hidden assumptions in the word “browsing,” but on Leopard (the OSX version for the past year and a half) has “Quick Look,” wherein you go to a Finder window filled with photos (or pretty much any other kind of document), select any document and hit the spacebar. It opens up a hovering window displaying the contents of the document, and hitting the right, left, up or down cursor keys walks through the current directory, displaying the contents of every document it finds. It’s pretty useful, because you don’t have to open up any application; just hit the space bar. There’s a large button on the bottom that enables you to zoom the image to full screen (hit escape to go out of full screen display).
Doing some quick tests, it works with pictures (jpg, gif, tiff, etc), text docs, rtf, pdf, Microsoft Office docs (doc, xls), and html.
If you’re looking for a picture-specific photo browsing application, I highly recommend GraphicConverter, which costs $35 and is worth five times as much, but if you want something free, just go into Preview (part of the OSX installation, in /Applications), and open a folder. It’ll show all pictures in the folder as thumbnails (with adjustable size using the slider at the bottom of the column), with the currently-selected picture displayed in the main part of the window (you can zoom this main image by dragging right side of window or by using the “Zoom” buttons on the tool bar). Then just use your cursor keys or the scroll bar to quickly go through the thumbnails.
Or maybe I just completely miss the point (I’m operating on only one cup of coffee ATM).
ETA: I dislike iPhoto as well, except for the amazing screensaver thingy.
I keep all photos backed up on at least 2 spare hard drives.
I run a hard drive of therm on my system to view with. That hard drive only has photos and keeps them from the “C” drive.
If I don’t know what folder one is in, I use ‘thumbnails’ with IrfanView to hunt for them.
I do use traditional file tree methods to store them so I have a lot of folders. I have found that a description of groups/files works better for me than just dates.