I’ve been experimenting with different apps and workflows for my 250,000 digital photos and videos from the last decade. I’d like to be able to view, edit and organise these images. After a few weeks I have to say that there is, unfortunately, no one perfect solution that meets all my needs. Here’s a summary of some of my learnings and decisions from the mix and match workflow I’m still puzzling together. How do you organise your photos and digital assets?
Picasa
Sadly, this is no longer an option. I’m including it in this list as hopefully one day, there will be a suitable replacement. Google bought and killed this off in 2016. Google photos never really replaced it sufficiently. Seems many others out there in internet land are still mourning it too. Here’s what I liked.
- Original photo files stayed in their original location (in my case an external hard drive) and you edited from there, including being able to reorganise and change file names and metadata.
- Nice interface that was pleasant to use, images were a decent size
- It had lots of simple, easy to use features – just enough but not too many to be complicated. It included cropping, resizing, text on the image (or bulk images), basic editing.
- Automatic Face recognition and location map
- Easy ways to make albums and CHOOSE to share online with friends (not be forced to keep all photos in the cloud like most of the current services do).
- It was free, though something I’d be most willing to pay for if they brought it back or something similar!
iPhoto
Though Apple no longer use the “I” in front of this app name, I continue to for clarity. Over the last week, I imported all of my photo collection from the last decade
Here’s what I do like:
- Browsing
- Automatic face recognition and location map
Here’s what I don’t like:
- When you import photos as a referenced file (by keeping them on the external hard drive), they are not supposed to sync to iCloud. However for some strange reason, of my 230,000 photos, around 10,000 WERE rather randomly syncing to iCloud. After a few hours of trying to solve this in
Adobe Bridge
This is part of Adobe’s Creative Cloud
Adobe Lightroom
Overview
I’m working on this table:
| Feature | iPhoto | Google Photos | Dropbox | Lr | Br |
| Photo previews | n/a | Small | Big | Big | |
| Edit directly on drive | not easily | no | yes | ||
| Store full sized | |||||
Would love to have other insights on this, please share!
Zestee 