What's a good iPhoto alternative for a regular user?

What's a good alternative to iPhoto (for a non-professional, casual user)?

I've upgraded my wife's Mac (from MacOS 10.9 to 10.13) and all of a sudden iPhoto wasn't compatible and upgrading was a real hassle (but worked out now). In any case Apple wants people to switch over to Photos, but I hear that either aren't worth having and I'm trying to figure out if this is true and what alternatives are out there.
It has to be easy to use, stable and easy to organize and find photos and videos. Editing is rarely done, but basic editing features (cropping etc.) would be nice.

I personally use Lightroom 6 (perpetual) which unfortunately isn't available any longer (any subscription-based software is out of the question). I like that photos are organized within regular folders instead of just a proprietary format. That way, in case the library is lost/damaged etc. the photos are mostly organized anyway.
I hear that Adobe Bridge is still available (for free), so maybe that's an option? I haven't used it since a decade ago, but unless it's gotten an overhaul it's basically just folder-organizer with a viewer built in. No albums as far as I can remember.

Other alternatives that come to mind are Skylum Luminar, On1 RAW 2020 and Capture One. I know very little about them.

motion said:

What's a good alternative to iPhoto (for a non-professional, casual user)?

I've upgraded my wife's Mac (from MacOS 10.9 to 10.13) and all of a sudden iPhoto wasn't compatible and upgrading was a real hassle (but worked out now). In any case Apple wants people to switch over to Photos, but I hear that either aren't worth having and I'm trying to figure out if this is true and what alternatives are out there.
It has to be easy to use, stable and easy to organize and find photos and videos. Editing is rarely done, but basic editing features (cropping etc.) would be nice.

I personally use Lightroom 6 (perpetual) which unfortunately isn't available any longer (any subscription-based software is out of the question). I like that photos are organized within regular folders instead of just a proprietary format. That way, in case the library is lost/damaged etc. the photos are mostly organized anyway.
I hear that Adobe Bridge is still available (for free), so maybe that's an option? I haven't used it since a decade ago, but unless it's gotten an overhaul it's basically just folder-organizer with a viewer built in. No albums as far as I can remember.

Other alternatives that come to mind are Skylum Luminar, On1 RAW 2020 and Capture One. I know very little about them.

Click to expand...

Bridge is still there, still kind of the ugly duckling, and still free. Fast though. And it can make collections, which is basically the same as what iPhoto calls "albums." It's also better than Photos or iPhoto at photo metadata, exif, captions, keywords, and all that. And you can filter on those to make it easier to find stuff. Worth a look.

Luminar is heavy on the adjusting, really deficient in the organization, if the latter is your priority. Capture One would be overkill probably.

Photos is the new iPhoto. It's not that bad (it's got better since it was first introduced), and it can be set to use a referenced library (aka files in folders) rather than hiding the files in its package. Give it a try, before you dismiss it.

Capture One is primarily for editing raw files - it's very good at that, but not the simple photo organiser you're looking for.

Thanks for your comments, guys.

Organizing photos (and videos) is the number one priority as she very rarely needs to edit, so apparently Skylum Luminar is out. I assumed Capture One would be overkill and not first of all an organizer but had to ask ;-)

I agree about Bridge being the ugly duckling -and while functionality is the most important thing a user-friendly user interface is also quite important.

I'll give Photos a go (if it doesn't work out I assume I can always export the photos to folders for use in something else). Photos are organized in albums as events (i.e. "Vacation in Spain") but seldom used in multiple albums, meaning that it would be easy to export everything into folders.

Having Photos organize into folders is news to me. Is that a default setting or do you have to change something? I like the idea of a failsafe backup organizing system in case the proprietory organizing is lost/damaged. That's one of the reasons I'm happy with Lightroom (the perpetual version, mind you!).

That leaves On1 RAW 2020. Has anyone here used it and can share their experiences in regards to the above questions?

Photos with a referenced library is about as good as iPhoto was with a referenced library - that is, very poor. It has no real tools for importing or arranging or renaming or moving or even deleting files. Using either of these apps in referenced mode is a world of pain for precisely zero advantage.

IN general Photos is as good at most things as iPhoto was, better in some ways. It's hard to beat for a general user.

Start photos, click on Help->Photos help.

The default, storing images in the Photos library, is really just a hidden folder tree: the library is a package. If you right click on the library and choose "show package contents" you'll see all the folders. The images are under 'originals', albeit in a very user-unfriendly structure with random-ish names. Note the warnings in the help file about messing with the contents of the library through Finder.

You can easily export photos from the library, if you need to.

motion said:

What's a good alternative to iPhoto (for a non-professional, casual user)?

I've upgraded my wife's Mac (from MacOS 10.9 to 10.13) and all of a sudden iPhoto wasn't compatible and upgrading was a real hassle (but worked out now). In any case Apple wants people to switch over to Photos, but I hear that either aren't worth having and I'm trying to figure out if this is true and what alternatives are out there.
It has to be easy to use, stable and easy to organize and find photos and videos. Editing is rarely done, but basic editing features (cropping etc.) would be nice.

I personally use Lightroom 6 (perpetual) which unfortunately isn't available any longer (any subscription-based software is out of the question). I like that photos are organized within regular folders instead of just a proprietary format. That way, in case the library is lost/damaged etc. the photos are mostly organized anyway.
I hear that Adobe Bridge is still available (for free), so maybe that's an option? I haven't used it since a decade ago, but unless it's gotten an overhaul it's basically just folder-organizer with a viewer built in. No albums as far as I can remember.

Other alternatives that come to mind are Skylum Luminar, On1 RAW 2020 and Capture One. I know very little about them.

Click to expand...

Just to add some of my own comments to the others.

Photos is a direct replacement for iPhoto, but locks the images away in its managed database like never before (it even renames all the files with long coded names, so you can't easily copy them out of the library file, you have to export them).

Referencing is possible, but usually a recipe for a lot of pain later. You can 'consolidate' them into a managed library, but it is a one way action, you can't go back to referenced.

Reliability is also a big issue for me. I have about 60,000 images, largely Raw files from different cameras, and find that it starts to crash and corrupt stuff past a certain point (somewhere after about 20,000 I think), and cannot import large numbers of images in one go.

After trying out so many apps over the years, I'm sticking with Lightroom Photography Plan for now. It's mature, reliable, updated regularly, supports more Raw files than Photos, and is much faster on my ageing iMac. It may seem expensive, but for £10/mth you get an awful lot of stuff included - Lightroom and Photoshop, and you can sync everything to mobile devices too (Lightroom on the iPhone is pretty good, and the included camera is excellent for shooting Raw on my old iPhone 6S). It seems to fill in the middle ground very well in terms of cost versus functions. Just add up the figures, is the subscription actually that bad? Why is it out of the question? Lightroom is £120 (or $120) per year (can be cheaper if you get vouchers off Amazon), but you get Lightroom and Photoshop (and more) for that (Photoshop used to cost £1800), Capture one is £300, and a charged upgrade about once a year too, but you consider that as OK? (just some food for thought, that's all, in the end it's up to you)

Capture One is expensive, although reputedly very good, probably overkill for what you need (even more so than Lightroom).

On1 might be a good option, I think it's well priced and well featured, and seems to do a good job, I would have considered that if the Lightroom import feature worked better.

If you're more interested in the organisational side, maybe also check out some of the Open Source options, Digikam has a DAM almost without comparison, and there's XnView MP too, both for free.

If you want a nice all rounder with some OK organisational tools, and excellent editing tools, at a decent cost, check out Graphic Converter too, it does more than you'd expect.

I still find it hard to come up with anything better than Lightroom for a modest amateur/hobbyist. As you say, all my photos are in my own folder structure, saved with sidecar xmp files, so I can migrate if I had to.

Beware though, that any non-destructive editing you've done with any of these apps, will need to be all done again if you want to keep using that as a workflow, as edits are all proprietary with any of these apps (and is one of the biggest reasons I stick with Lightroom). Any of them will lock you in to some extent.

Good luck.

Incidentally, my wife would be very much the kind of user you describe and I migrated her to Cloudy Lightroom - which she finds easy to use and enjoys very much.

terrydev said:

Incidentally, my wife would be very much the kind of user you describe and I migrated her to Cloudy Lightroom - which she finds easy to use and enjoys very much.

Click to expand...

Another fan of Lightroom Cloudy here, but OP has completely ruled out subscription software.

Also doesn't maintain the originals in organised structure.

motion said:

I've upgraded my wife's Mac (from MacOS 10.9 to 10.13) and all of a sudden iPhoto wasn't compatible and upgrading was a real hassle (but worked out now). In any case Apple wants people to switch over to Photos, but I hear that either aren't worth having and I'm trying to figure out if this is true and what alternatives are out there.
It has to be easy to use, stable and easy to organize and find photos and videos. Editing is rarely done, but basic editing features (cropping etc.) would be nice.

Click to expand...

I'm running 10.14.6 and I'm still using iPhoto. Not sure about incompatibility with 10.13 you are having. I don't care for Photos so I still use iPhoto.

JAW

OP:

You can still use iPhoto with High Sierra.

The "trick" is that you need THE LAST VERSION of iPhoto, which is version 9.6.1.
NO OTHER VERSION WILL WORK.

GETTING version 9.6.1 can be problematic, but it CAN BE FOUND if you're not shy about where you look.

I'm using OS 10.14.6 (Mojave), and version 9.6.1 of iPhoto still works fine here.

Something you can try (no promises that this will work).
a. Delete the version of iPhoto that you have now
b. Go to the App Store and click on "purchases"
c. See if iPhoto is "on the list" (even though it was free)
d. If you see it, try downloading it
(again, no promises).

If nothing else works, try this search string:
"torrent iphoto 9.6.1"
I'll say nothing more.

Photos is probably a reasonable substitute for iPhoto – unless you were already using (or in the market) for more powerful programs like Aperture, Lightroom, Photoshop, GIMP, etc.

Keep in mind that iPhoto and Photos are both consumer-ooriented applications. There are other applications like Adobe Photoshop Elements that are not free but also not (yet) "subscription".

You could try Pixelmator which is a good alternative to Photoshop but extremely inexpensive.


I'd also suggest Affinity Photo but that MAY be too much for your needs?

However continuing to use iPhoto will give you basic cataloguing facilities but both it and Photos are limited in what they offer, for example no layer based editing.

ChrisLumix said:

You could try Pixelmator which is a good alternative to Photoshop but extremely inexpensive.

https://www.pixelmator.com/pro/

I'd also suggest Affinity Photo but that MAY be too much for your needs?

However continuing to use iPhoto will give you basic cataloguing facilities but both it and Photos are limited in what they offer, for example no layer based editing.

Click to expand...

Thanks. I'm aware of both (I have Affinity Photo myself), but the question was mainly concerning organizing photos, not editing them.

For editing there are plenty of options. Not so much it seems for organizing. Or rather: not so many alternatives to Lightroom (I'm particularly interested in setting up a fail-safe folder based organizing system for my wife as those proprietory single-file libraries of iPhoto etc. can cause great havoc if/when they stop working.

At least with a folder based system you only lose albums and such, not your main organization of photos and videos.

JPAlbert said:

OP:

You can still use iPhoto with High Sierra.

The "trick" is that you need THE LAST VERSION of iPhoto, which is version 9.6.1.
NO OTHER VERSION WILL WORK.

GETTING version 9.6.1 can be problematic, but it CAN BE FOUND if you're not shy about where you look.

Click to expand...

Indeed! I struggled a lot with this the other day, but finally worked it out by copying over version 9.6.1 of our Macs. I've obtained it legally, but can't remember if it came pre-installed on a Mac, as part of a MacOS installation DVD or whatever. I think it was part of iLife 11.

So now I've updated here iPhoto libraries for use with iPhoto 9.6.1/MacOS 10.13.6 and can either let her continue using that or upgrade to Photos. I see many differing views on either app, but I do know they both use a special, proprietory organizing system which of course is the weak link of it all. Is one of them more reliable to use than the other?

Like I said earlier, we're not paying monthly fees for something like the current version of Lightroom, but I'm struggling to see what else is worthwhile investing time into merging all those photo libraries into. One thing I heard about iPhoto/Photos is that it's easy for it to mess around and lose photos, and it's hard to even find out they've been lost unless you specifically know what to look for. At least in Lightroom you have the "synchronize folder" feature.
Are there still shops around which sell (genuine/legal) boxed Lightroom DVDs, and with the possibility to update them to the latest version 6 from Adobe?

For organizing photos you could check out Photo Supreme.

motion said:

One thing I heard about iPhoto/Photos is that it's easy for it to mess around and lose photos, and it's hard to even find out they've been lost unless you specifically know what to look for.

Click to expand...

Messing around with the inside of any database is a good way to lose data.

If you were to mess around with say, the relational database in your employer's Payroll Department that holds payroll records, the company would likely skin you alive. The idea of a database is not just to make things "proprietary" but to encapsulate related things, and to let the application safely make assumptions about them. Mess around with the insides of the database and you could break those invariant conditions.

To give a transactional example: "The ATM withdrawal does not occur unless the ATM dispenses $50 and withdraws $50 from the customer's account at the bank." In the absence of code to enforce this, the ATM might alternately rob you or rob the bank. The bank withdrawal would update databases which might have open formats or proprietary ones; what's important is that the databases work, are secure, and are backed up.

Both iPhoto and Photos can be set to use referenced mode (where original photos remain in directories of your choosing). Their referenced modes may not be as good as the ones in Aperture and Lightroom, though.

motion said:

but I do know they both use a special, proprietory organizing system which of course is the weak link of it all. Is one of them more reliable to use than the other?

Click to expand...

They don't really. The files are stored in folders, just the main folder looks like a single file. It's called a package. You can peek inside anytime, just right-click on it and choose 'Show Package Contents'.

However, Photos has a big feature, that that's syncing across your devices via the Cloud. To facilitate that the most recent version renames the file in cloud-friendly strings, so in a disaster situation you lose all your filenames.

Of course, the solution to that, and all such issues, is a comprehensive back-up strategy. So if your library goes boom you just replace it with an up-to-date back up. That applies with any app.

iPhoto was probably more robust that Photos is. But that's a short term solution. It relies on 32 bit elements and won't run after 10.14. So, your next Mac will drop you back in to the same situation all over again.

motion said:

Are there still shops around which sell (genuine/legal) boxed Lightroom DVDs, and with the possibility to update them to the latest version 6 from Adobe?

Click to expand...

Another short term solution at best, even if you can find a copy. You'll have trouble installing it on your next computer, as the installer is 32 bit and Adobe won't be updating that.

There are some apps that are straight purchase in this space: CaptureOne is very expensive and probably overkill for what you describe. But OnOne Photo Raw is a pretty good organiser. I'd try that next.

Tom_N said:

motion said:

One thing I heard about iPhoto/Photos is that it's easy for it to mess around and lose photos, and it's hard to even find out they've been lost unless you specifically know what to look for.

Click to expand...

Messing around with the inside of any database is a good way to lose data.

Click to expand...

I meant that the apps themselves (iPhoto or Photos) make a mess of this, or so I've heard. Yes, deliberately moving files or folders around outside of the app is no good idea.

Tom_N said:

Both iPhoto and Photos can be set to use referenced mode (where original photos remain in directories of your choosing). Their referenced modes may not be as good as the ones in Aperture and Lightroom, though.

Click to expand...

That's good if it works in a similar way as Lightroom's.
I mean: I start by importing photos and Lightroom is set up to organize the photos/videos by putting them in folders and sub-folders based on year, month and event.

That last bit is something I take advantage of a lot in Lightroom: organizing photos and videos into events, each in their own folder on the hard drive, but of course this also means I'm allowed to move things around between folders and creating new folders after having imported them. It sure helps organize stuff, but I have a feeling iPhoto or Photos won't allow that sort of thing, which is OK. Bottom line: if it can somehow import photos and put them in a year, month, day folder it's all good. Further organizing can be done within the app itself, but if that breaks all is not lost.

I started out with Adobe Bridge, organizing photos that way, and continued when I got Lightroom, so I've stuck to it as I find it works well both within the app and even outside the app (browsing through folders from the Finder desktop -of course without moving, editing or deleting anything).

--
"Are you a good person?"

motion said:

Thanks for your comments, guys.

Organizing photos (and videos) is the number one priority as she very rarely needs to edit, so apparently Skylum Luminar is out. I assumed Capture One would be overkill and not first of all an organizer but had to ask ;-)

I agree about Bridge being the ugly duckling -and while functionality is the most important thing a user-friendly user interface is also quite important.

I'll give Photos a go (if it doesn't work out I assume I can always export the photos to folders for use in something else). Photos are organized in albums as events (i.e. "Vacation in Spain") but seldom used in multiple albums, meaning that it would be easy to export everything into folders.

Having Photos organize into folders is news to me. Is that a default setting or do you have to change something? I like the idea of a failsafe backup organizing system in case the proprietory organizing is lost/damaged. That's one of the reasons I'm happy with Lightroom (the perpetual version, mind you!).

That leaves On1 RAW 2020. Has anyone here used it and can share their experiences in regards to the above questions?

Click to expand...

I have On1 RAW 2020. It works quite well for all of the things you listed as needs.