What's a good application for organizing photos on a Mac?

July 13, 2009 4:16 PM

What's a good application for organizing photos on a Mac?

I gather photos from websites and repost them on my blog. I'm looking for an application that will help me organize the photos before I use them. Ideally, I'd like the process to go like this:

1. Import the downloading photo into the application.
2. Add keywords so I can find the photo ("sink" "Chair" "paint")
3. Add information about where the photo came from (a URL, the name of the person who told me about it)
4. Repeat many times
5. Browse through the photos either by keyword or by skimming through thumbnails.

I don't want to edit the photos. It's important that the keywords and notes I add not be accessible once the photo is on the website.

I have iPhoto and Adobe Bridge, but they both are more program than I need for this -- I want something I can fire up, quickly use, and shut right back down. I tried Picasa but didn't like it, and it seemed (I could be wrong) that the notes I wrote would end up being public if the photos were used on the blog. PhotoReviewer was intriguing, but it doesn't work on OS 10.5.

Any suggestions?

posted by The corpse in the library to computers & internet (5 comments total)

You could use nothing but spotlight.

Use "Spotlight Comments" in Get Info to add your tags, and browse with saved searches or just typing tags as you need them. You can get big thumbnails by setting the icon size large and/or make use of Quicklook.
posted by floam at 4:22 PM on July 13 [1 favorite has favorites]

Zotero could handle this. It's specifically made for academics to keep track of all of the research materials that they find on the web, and allows you to add notes and tags to urls. I think the only thing it won't let you that you want is browse your library by thumbnail.
posted by zsazsa at 4:53 PM on July 13

Not having used them, I've seen things like Evernote, Zotero, Devonthink and Yojimbo for this sort of thing.

You could also use image cataloguing software like iView Media Pro (now owned by Microsoft and called Expression Media, but still excellent), Adobe Lightroom, or some other digital asset management piece of software. You could even use Flickr and just mark every picture as private. That might be a bit slow though.
posted by Magnakai at 6:26 PM on July 13

I second Spotlight. It does what you want quickly, is free because you already own it, and about as simple as you can get.
posted by Piscean at 7:39 PM on July 13

Never used it, but something like Deep looks interesting.
posted by misterbrandt at 12:39 PM on July 15