Photo management on a MAC

I am helping out a local pre-school with a system for the teacher's to use. We are trying to decide Mac. vs. Windows. Since use will be mostly for photo management and printing, the platform decision comes down to the workflow for downloading, categorizing, printing, backup and archive, and burning of CD's or DVD's for each student.

I personally use IMATCH (phtools.com) on a windows system for managing my photo's, I have little MAC experience since the 80's.

What are the photo management options for a MAC? Including built in features with the OS, and 3rd party applications.

I found an overview of windows applications is at the following link, anything similar for MAC's?
http://www.impulseadventure.com/photo/flow-catalog-compare.html

I just purchased The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers (O'Reilly Digital Studio) and will be reading.

Any and all feedback appreciated.

Ezra

I'm sure iPhoto will be the one people recommend the most. Simple to use, powerful enough that pros use it...and it can handle "up to 250,000 photos" and its free with any recent Mac. It will probably do everything you would want and more, and be easy enough that others may take some of the tasks on instead of being leaving it all to the expert.

http://www.apple.com/ilife/iphoto/

If you want to check out a variety of software, you might try MacWorld. The have reviews of a lot of mac software.

http://www.macworld.com/topics/software/imagingandphotos/

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Richard B.
http://www.pbase.com/richard_b

The preschool's requirements are pretty basic and should be satisfied rather easily by iPhoto. It is the most user friendly solution out there and the software that every other developer has copied. Also colors are more accurate on Macs. More importantly, colors of photos are more consistent between Mac applications because they read their color values from a central database. The same photo on a few different PC applications would look slightly different. Vista will fix this but for now. . . The only advantage to a traditional PC (remember, new Macs run Windows better than most PCs these days) is that many come with a built in memory card drive that can read the digital camera cards. Macs and PCs also let you plug the camera directly using a USB cable. A Mac (and it is NOT MAC) and some PCs would require a $15 USB2 card reader to be attached with a cable.

Also, Macs are just more fun, but that's probably not an explicit requirement from the preschool!

I will further endorse iPhoto for all of your photo management needs. I am on my 4th version of iPhoto and it just keeps getting better.

Just for the sake of clarity, iPhoto 6 is the version that ships currently with new macs.

But folks have come on here in the past and dismissed iPhoto based on experience with the earlier versions.

iPhoto 6 is a BIG improvement over the previous versions of iPhoto.
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Cheers,
Joe

Thanks folks for the feedback so far. I am looking for detailed information surrounding iPhoto's capabilties. The fluff at apple.com is not adequate, and the most detailed info I can find is at:

http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/iPhoto_6_Getting_Started.pdf#search=%22iphoto%206%20manual%22

but that's limited, so where does apple keep the details, without my actually purchasing a Mac and installing the application?

The specific needs are for Cataloging, and from what detail I have seen, iPhoto has limited Cataloging capabilities (Keywords, Albums, but no hierarchical categories).

Thanks for any light you can help shed on iPhoto documentation.

Ezra

It would behoove you to dig a wee bit deeper on the Apple site, especially under the Support tab:
http://www.apple.com/support/iphoto/

I would also go to the iPhoto discussion section of that site and do a search on what you need to find out. If that fails then post your same query on the discussion forum. That should be fruitful.

Thank you!

I think the combination of multiple categories, comments, folders and smart folders would deal with a wide range of scenarios. If you have a specific example I can let you know how iPhoto would handle it.

Najinsky

I like and use iPhoto, but the main problem with it is, even if you store your original pics outside the iPhoto library folder, it still only uses the thumbnails it creates when you add the photos into iPhoto. This means that if you edit a photo in Photoshop, you will only see your changes when you open the full size image, NOT in the the thumbnail.. I have found this to be a pain, so I use iView Media Pro until I'm done editing.
........dewars
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'Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another.' -- Fyodor Dostoevski

I tried but iPhoto but discovered that I greatly prefer Adobe Bridge for viewing and managing photos. Bridge is a polished, mature application. Adobe really knows photography,and it shows. Bridge ships as part of Photoshop Elements for Mac 4, which is also a great program for editing photos.

I recommend you at least try Adobe PSE4 and Bridge. They are inexpensive (about $70, I believe). Bridge lets me browse my hierarchical photo menus with ease, and then open any I want to edit in Photoshop Elements with a single click.

I have not found that to be true. How exactly are you accessing the photos in PS? In both iPhoto 5 and now 6, I have my preferences set up to launch PS Elements any time I double click a photo. I am automatically taken to PSE where I do my edits. When done, I hit Apple-W and save my file.

About 3 seconds after I return to iPhoto, the photo I was working on is suddenly updated with the changes. I routinely e-mail photos and export photos out of iPhoto and have always gotten a full resolution version with my PSE changes.

I guess I disagree with most of your observations as well. I use Bridge reluctantly in CS2 because I like how it translates Pentax RAW files to quickie jpegs better than iView Media Pro does. I also find the interface with Adobe Camera Raw acceptable but nothing to write home about. To call Bridge a mature application--even without comparing it to iPhoto--is a little funny. Bridge is more a transition browser that links your picture to other Adobe applications because Adobe doesn't have a decent workflow solution that integrates these tools. The proof is in the development of Lightroom. Bridge is effectively obsoleted by Aperture.

iPhoto has been through at least 6 versions, each with significant functionality and performance improvements. Now that's mature. iPhoto uses metadata to organize photos according to your requirements. Its information architecture can exist apart from the location of your data files. Bridge replicates the Finder directories which may have little relationship to a useful organization of photos.

Bridge doesn’t stink up the house but I think it has a pretty limited lifespan especially when compared to forthcoming versions of iView Media Pro, Aperture, asset management tools published by smaller shops, and Adobe Lightroom.

Yes, it does update, but not the thumbnail preview. You need to have iPhoto access the original/updated file before you can see the changes. iPhoto creates thumbnails of it's own, which do not update. Try this, take a photo, open it in PS, paint a big black line on it, save it (as a PSD), go back into iPhoto. You will not see the line on the thumbnail preview, you will need to view the file at full resolution in order to see the change. This may not be a big deal to some, but I like to see the changes I've made in the thumbnail. Whereas programs like iView use a thumbnail of the original/updated photo, iPhoto creates it's own thumbnail when you import the photo into iPhoto. Changes made to a photo will not update the thumbnail that iPhoto originally created.
.......Dewars
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'Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another.' -- Fyodor Dostoevski

dewars - when you save as a PSD, you have specify a location for the file. Where are you saving the file? Rule number 1 of iPhoto is 'do not mess with the file structure' and dropping a file straight into the iPhoto library is asking for trouble. There are too many pointers being bypassed.

I rarely save files as full blown PSDs - too much hassle in my mind. If you save the changes as a JPEG by just hitting Apple-W, those changes get properly saved into the iPhoto database, thumbnails included.

As everyone else is saying, use iPhoto 6.

Oh, it's Mac, MAC. MAC is an acronym common used for Media Access Control number.
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Thanks,

Allan Marcus
Maxxum 5D
Olympus C-750
Mac OS X