Managing a huge gallery and organizing photos is a tricky business, even if you’re generally tidy, so it’s always a good idea to use some help. Especially when there’s software out there designed specifically to deal with an overload of pictures.
Top 5 Best Photo Management Software for Mac To Organize Digital Photos 1. CyberLink PhotoDirector 365. Cyberlink PhotoDirector 365 is a photo management tool that not only helps you to. Adobe Photoshop Elements 15. Adobe Photoshop Elements 15 is a simpler and efficient way of organizing your. View mode in Luminar. Luminar 4 is a great photo editor for Mac that lets you store, organize, and edit your photos quickly and easily. There’s no need to manually import your images to Luminar. Once you guide Luminar to your default photo folder, you can use Luminar just like Photos; it lets you view your photos in a gallery by date, color code, favorites, and so on.
The only trouble with professional photo organizing software is that, much like any photo equipment, it’s painfully expensive. In this article we’ll suggest tools that tame your giant photo gallery without leaving a hole in your pocket.
Best photo manager apps for Mac reviewed
| Rating | Name | Features | Info |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Gemini 2 | Best at keeping your photos cleaned up where they live. | Link |
| 2 | Photos | Organize your photos by album, people or places. | Link |
| 3 | Mylio | Syncs and organizes your photo library across all devices: Apple, Android, or Windows. | Link |
1. Gemini 2: The duplicate photo finder
The first step to getting your photos organized is to remove all of the duplicate or similar-looking images. Chances are when you take a picture, you don’t take just one; you take 15. All from different angles, maybe even with different poses. But rarely do you need or want all of them, so now they’re just taking up space on your Mac.
The easiest way to get rid of those files is to get a duplicate photo finder, Gemini 2. It scans your whole gallery and locates the duplicate or similar photos. Gemini 2 lets you quickly review and choose which pictures you want to delete. But the app also uses AI to select the best version of each image, and it will get rid of all of the copies with just one click of the Smart Cleanup button.
2. Photos: Best photo organizer on Mac
Here’s the biggest secret to good photo organization: master Photos. You might be thinking: seriously, is a native Apple app really any good? And you’d be surprised how much it is.
Since macOS Sierra, Photos has been getting makeovers and new features. In macOS Mojave, the app lets you organize content just by dragging-and-dropping it, and with Smart Albums, you can instantly group photos by date, camera, and even the person in them. At this point, it’s just a really good piece of photo management software.
3. Mylio: A free photo manager app
If you’ve been meaning to consolidate your photos in one place for years, Mylio will help you do just that. When you first start using the app, it offers to look for your photos on the current device, on an external drive, and even on your Facebook.
Once all the photos you’ve taken in your lifetime are imported, Mylio organizes into a variety of views. The coolest one is Calendar, showing you photo collections on an actual calendar. That way, you’ll quickly find the photos from your son’s first birthday, even if you forgot how you named the folder. Plus, Mylio offers a free mobile app, so you can access your photo library wherever you are.
4. Adobe Lightroom: Cloud-based photo editor and organizer
While Adobe Lightroom is probably best known as a powerful picture editor, it’s also loaded with tons of tools to help keep your photos organized. It stores your pics in the Adobe Cloud so you can access all of your albums and folders on another computer, phone, or even an internet browser.
One of the great things about Lightroom is that it makes non-destructive edits to your photos. So, you can revert back to the original image at any time, and you don’t need to create a duplicate just to preserve your picture.
5. Luminar: Organize and view pictures without importing them
If you have your pictures saved in various folders across your computer, then Luminar is the app you’ll want to check out. It shows you all of your photos without having to import any of them into a library. So you can start using Luminar in almost no time.
6. Adobe Bridge: Free photo library manager
You might be wondering why Adobe would make two separate photo managers. Aside from Adobe Bridge being free for everyone, it serves an entirely different purpose. Bridge is solely an image and asset manager. Unlike Lightroom, it doesn’t have any editing functionality.
So, what’s the point then? Where Bridge really shines is if you’re using other Adobe products, such as Photoshop or Illustrator. You can store and organize all of your pictures in Bridge and then open them in any Adobe program without creating a duplicate or searching through the thousands of files on your computer. Plus, Bridge offers a robust search tool making it a breeze to find the exact image you’re looking for.
Final word on photo management on Mac
There are basically two things you need to remember to bring order into your photographing life:
- Before you get to organization and management, be sure to unclutter your photo library. The easiest way to do it is with a duplicate finder, such as Gemini 2. Otherwise you'll be rummaging around in thousands of photos you don't even need.
- Photos, the native photo manager on a Mac, can accomplish everything you need to make organizing photos into groups and categories easy.
- Third-party tools can provide you with added functionality that’s missing in native macOS tools, like calendar view or managing photos right in the Finder.
Now that you know all the secrets to photo organization, Mac photography shouldn’t be that hard or that expensive. Not when you’ve got the right tricks up your sleeve.
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It’s easier than ever now to take a photograph. We do it all the time. From selfies to landscapes and from vacation snaps to family photos, we’re all busy filling our iPhones and our hard drives with folders and folders of images.
That growth in image-making gives us two challenges.
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First, we have to be able to find and organize those images on our Macs. We know what we’ve taken; too often though, we just don’t know where those pictures are, or how to organize them effectively. That's especially true if we're using external hard drives to store our photos.
Second, we need to be able to make those images better because few of us ever play with the options in the camera app. We point and shoot, and we know that our pictures can be improved. Once we’ve found them, we need a quick and easy way to make those pictures look better.
For owners of Macs, the choice of photo management software is now broad.
How Do I Choose A Photo Management App?
There are dozens of programs that promise Mac users optimal management and simple image editing. When you’re assessing the best photo management software for Macs, you’re going to be looking at a number of features.
The organization of the images should be clear. You should be able to easily find the photos you want to open and edit. So the editing tools offered by the software should be straightforward and intuitive. Professional image editors might know what each icon stands for and what adjusting things like white balance can do but casual users need to be free to experiment and play. The goal for every photo management software will always be to combine powerful editing features with an easy workflow that makes improving and organizing images a breeze.
What Is the Best Photo Management Software for Mac?
One option has always been Picasa, Google’s now defunct photo service, and Mac comes with its own native photo editor which is okay as far as it goes. But there are plenty of Picasa alternatives that… let’s face it, do a much better job than Google ever did, especially for Mac owners. And Mac’s native editor only goes about as far as free software is expected to go.
One program that does manage to bring together strong editing and easy use is our own Picktorial. Now in version 3.5, Picktorial is photo organizing software for Mac that provides a single-space workflow. That means you get everything you need on one screen. You don’t lose the photo or have to battle through menus when you look for the option you want to use, whether that’s a blurring tool to soften a portrait or color adjustment to deepen a sunset.
It’s also a RAW image editor with a very simple conversion to Jpeg. That lets you work with the photo created by your camera before it’s been compressed.And the comparable editing is very neat. You can easily see how the image has changed and improved, and why all the work you’ve put into adjusting colors and changing brightness was so worthwhile. It’s beautifully done.
Additional Tips for Mac Photo Management
Picktorial is a great tool for managing photos on Macs but not just because of its easy workflow. One of the most important features of photo management software is non-destructive image editing.
Even the most talented and experienced image editors make mistakes. They don’t always know the best path to the best image, and they sometimes make changes that they regret. It’s vital that they can make all of these changes without damaging the original image. When you’re assessing photo organizing software for Mac, do make sure the program won’t be writing over the original images but will be making the changes separately. Picktorial even lets you roll back the changes out of order. That’s something even Photoshop can’t do.
Access to the metadata is important too. Every image you create will come with metadata built in. That data might include information about the speed and focal length used to take the photo—useful when you’re trying to improve your photography—but it could also include location data and date.
That’s useful information too but you might want to edit it to make it more consistent and make your pictures easier to find. Picktorial is one of the few photo management programs that allows users to edit their metadata.
When you’re assessing photo management software, make a checklist, and make sure that that check list has the following:
- Non-destructive editing
- RAW photo editing and seamless conversion
- Intuitive workflow
- Metadata editing
- Single space workflow
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Those features aren’t all you’ll be looking for in photo management software for Macs. But they are a good place to begin. They’ll give you the means to find the images you’ve taken, retrieve them, and make them look as beautiful as you expected them to look when you took them.Like taking pictures itself, that’s now easier than ever to do too.