Best Photo Management Tool For Mac

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We tested nine photo manager programs for a total of 85 hours to discover which had the best organizing, editing and sharing features. Our choice for the best photo manager software is CyberLink PhotoDirector 9. It lets you organize photos by date, color labels, star ratings, locations and even by person through facial recognition. We tested nine photo manager programs for a total of 85 hours to discover which had the best organizing, editing and sharing features. Our choice for the best photo manager software is CyberLink PhotoDirector 9. It lets you organize photos by date, color labels, star ratings, locations and even by person through facial recognition. Third Light is a fast, feature-rich, digital asset management tool. Organise, tag, find, share, edit and download all of your digital files quickly, easily and securely. Online chat and share supports centralized, collaborative working with internal teams and external partners. Convert formats, trace copyright, protect and distribute files.

Digital photo software is designed for people who want to organize and share personal and family photos, but don't want to spend a lot of time editing them. In addition to helping you browse and sort through your image collection, they also allow you to catalog your media with keywords, descriptions, and categories. These tools usually do not offer pixel-level editing capabilities, but they do provide easy, one-click corrections plus printing and photo sharing features.

Google Photos (Windows, Mac and Linux)

What We Like

  • Free, unlimited backups.

  • Deeply tied into Google's app ecosystem.

  • Works with HD videos, too.

What We Don't Like

  • Ties into your Google account, so it might become your default in Android.

  • Uses 'face grouping' to scan your images to search for people.

Google Photos is a flashy and functional digital photo organizer and editor which has improved considerably since its first release. Google Photos is excellent for beginners and casual digital shooters who want to find all their pictures, sort them into albums, do quick edits, and share with friends and family. With Google Photos, everything is online and easily accessible from anywhere. If you're a fan of Google Drive and the other Google online applications, you'll feel right at home with Google Photos. Best of all, Google Photos is free!

Download Google Photo for Android.

Adobe Photoshop Elements (Windows and Mac)

What We Like

  • Integrates with Adobe's entire Creative Suite portfolio.

  • Git tool for mac os. Outstanding, robust toolkit for image editing.

What We Don't Like

  • Expensive — $99 license for the 2019 version.

  • Album features take a back seat to image processing and editing.

Photoshop Elements includes an outstanding photo organizer along with a full-featured photo editor for the best of both worlds. The user interface is friendly to beginners, but not 'dumbed-down' to the point that it frustrates experienced users. Elements utilizes a powerful, keyword-based system of tagging photos that allows you to find specific photos very quickly. In addition, you can create albums, perform quick fixes, and share your photos in a variety of photo layouts.

Purchase Adobe Photoshop Elements for Windows or Mac.

Apple iPhoto (Mac and iOS)

What We Like

  • Works on both Mac and iOS.

  • Free, native app for light editing.

  • Great slideshow features.

What We Don't Like

  • Movies focus on QuickTime, which is less established in the Windows world.

  • It's a stock app — good enough for light use, but not as full-featured as a tightly crafted album app.

Apple's photo cataloging solution was developed exclusively for Mac OS X. It comes pre-installed on Macintosh systems or as part of the Apple iLife suite. With iPhoto, you can organize, edit, and share your photos, create slide shows, order prints, make photo books, upload online albums, and create QuickTime movies.

iPhone users are likely already using iPhoto. That's where it's really blown up in popularity, and where it really connects to the rest of the Apple ecosystem. The integration with iCloud lets you easily upload your photos and access them from anywhere, including your Mac running iPhoto.

ACDSee Photo Manager (Windows and Mac)

What We Like

  • Free trial, and four different paid models to select from.

  • Robust ecosystem of apps focused on video and photo editing.

  • Desktop and mobile versions available.

For

What We Don't Like

  • The programs are expensive, compared to competitors.

  • ACDSee's portfolio tends to favor power users, so you may find it too complex for casual use.

ACDSee Photo Manager packs a lot of punch for the price. It's rare to find a photo manager with this many features and options for browsing and organizing files. In addition, it has integrated image editing tools for some of the most common tasks such as cropping, adjusting overall image tone, removing red-eye, adding text, and so on. And after organizing and editing your images you can share them in a number of ways including slideshows (EXE, screensaver, Flash, HTML, or PDF formats), Web galleries, printed layouts, or by burning copies onto CD or DVD.

Zoner Photo Studio Free (Windows)

What We Like

  • Actively developed program with a publicly available feature roadmap.

  • Rich toolset reminiscent of Adobe Photoshop.

  • Free 30-day trial, with modest monthly or annual pricing thereafter.

What We Don't Like

  • Stand-alone app, without video support.

  • You can make contact sheets and do basic photo organization, but otherwise it's not designed to be a robust organizing tool.

Zoner Photo Studio Free is a multi-faceted free photo editing and management tool. It offers users three working environments, namely the Manager, Viewer and Editor windows. The purpose of each aspect of Zoner Photo Studio Free is quite self explanatory and breaking down the interface into this tabbed environment is quite effective in use.

digiKam (Windows, Mac, and Linux)

What We Like

  • Open Source

  • Cross Platform

  • Wide range of file support

  • Easy metadata editing

What We Don't Like

  • Can be really dense for new users

  • Interface is pretty plain by default

digiKam is an open source photo management program that's packed with features. It's build to be a truly all-in-one solution to handle everything you'll want to do with your photos.

With digiKam you can keep your photos perfectly organized with its library management tools, and tag them efficiently by easily editing their metadata. digiKam also lets you import, export, and share your images without any hassle.

If you need to make any adjustments to your photos, digiKam comes with a full set of image editing tools that can handle the RAW file type, enabling the utmost quality in photo editing.

Linux users can also find digiKam in their distribution repositories.

Piwigo (Cloud - Linux)

What We Like

  • Open source

  • Accessible from anywhere

  • Clean interface

What We Don't Like

If you like the idea of Google Photos, but you'd prefer to host your own photo server, Piwigo is the perfect solution for you. Piwigo can be best described as WordPress, but for photos. It's a cloud-hosted photo management app that you can access from anywhere and any device.

With Piwigo, you can host your own photo library and control exactly who has access. You can allow family and friends to view or even contribute their own photos, making sharing fun and really simple.

Unless you find a web host that sets up Piwigo for you, and some do, it does take some technical knowledge to get running, and that might be a big downside for some people.

Suggest a Photo Organizer

If you have a favorite digital photo organizer that I neglected to include here, add a comment to let me know. Please only suggest digital photo software and not pixel-level image editors.

There aren't many Mac photo management apps that aren't geared towards a specific purpose, but among the few we think Lyn is the best for it's speed, wide format compatibility, and good integration with popular online services.

Lyn

Platform: Mac OS X
Price: $20
Download Page

Features

  • Progressive display on single or multiple monitor configurations
  • Load images of virtually any size
  • Multi-threading to take advantage of multicore CPUs
  • Compatible with High Dynamic-Range (HDR) images like TIFF float as well as Radiance and OpenEXR
  • Common metadata parser: EXIF, Camera's maker note, GPS, GeoTIFF, IPTC
  • Image navigation with Apple Remote Control or Magic Trackpad
  • Fullscreen and slideshow
  • Full IPTC editing with user-defined presets
  • Batch convert and rename
  • User-defined places
  • Non-destructive editing for image transformations
  • Easily browse your iPhoto, Aperture, and Lightroom libraries (Mac OS X 10.5 or later required)
  • Facebook, Flickr, 500px, and Picasa Web Albums sharing (Mac OS X 10.5 or later required)

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Where It Excels

Lyn is a very versatile photo manager that works the way you want to work. If you're coming from iPhoto, it can read your iPhoto library as-is. If you just want an app for viewing a folder structure currently on your drive, Lyn can handle that as well. However you want to manage your photos, it can adapt. Additionally, it can handle pretty much any type of image you through at it. The app, overall, is very versatile. When you want to put your images elsewhere, it also integrates very well with online services like Facebook, Flickr, and Picasa so you can easily share your images. On top of all of that, Lyn is very fast at loading image previews. That is exceptionally helpful for people with large collections.

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Where It Falls Short

There isn't much to complain about with Lyn. It manages your photos, works quickly, and integrates with likely every online service you'd want to use. What you don't get, however, is some of the special features you'll find in applications like iPhoto. Lyn doesn't provide facial recognition or organize using Apple's 'event' structure. You also can't order books, cards, and other products directly from the app. If you really care about those things, you're probably already happy with iPhoto. If not, you should be using Lyn.

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Best Photo Management App For Mac 2017

The Competition

iPhoto ($15), our former reigning champ, is a really great, simple, feature-rich app that mostly just suffers from being a bit bloated and slow. It's also not fantastic at organizing an enormous collection of photos. Nonetheless, it's cheap and manages to do a lot. If your photo library isn't enormous and you have plenty of disk space, iPhoto is a good choice.

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Picasa is an obvious choice if you use Picasa on the web. If that's your photo sharing service of choice, you'll probably want to use the desktop app as well.

Flickery is essentially a desktop interface for Flickr. It'll cost you $10 (although you can try it for free for 15 days), but that price may be worthwhile if you're primarily a Flickr user and want an iPhoto-like interface that's dedicated to the service.

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If you're really serious about your photos, you may prefer managing them with the pricey, more professional Aperture or Lightroom. Aperture is like iPhoto for pros, and Lightroom is a similar take on the same concept.

Then there's what I do: I put photos in folders in Dropbox. I can quicklook everything in the Finder, the thumbnails can be made large in icon view, everything automatically syncs online, it's easy to share the files, it syncs with my iPhone the same as iPhoto, and I can access every photo from my phone with the Dropbox app. I chose to do this because all the photo management software I used was too slow and bloated. I wanted something quick. It's not a solution for everyone, but if you just want to organize your images without hassle it works very well.

Best Photo Management Software Mac

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Photo Management For Mac

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