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Photo Browser for my Archive?

Reality4711

Reality4711

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Aug 8, 2009
806
670
scotland
As I produce less photographs I find the urge to look/browse the last 20yrs or so of images. Sad isn't it?

Anyway, files are just in year order with no search criterion assigned. The images are RAW/ORF/NEF/RAF?tiff/jpg/png, etc etc etc; in other words a right royal mix.

Having never gotten on with software that required me to import my images before I could edit over time I have used all sorts of methods to view whatever files I was working on at the time and changed that method as I progressed through multiple camera systems.

Question! Is there a browser that I can use to view ALL the images in my archive hard drives. All my RawFile &export files that are of the last three years are covered by Apple Photo and FRV because that is what I am using now. The external HDDs have about 5TB of images on them- so no pressure - I need a browser that I do not have to import into for it to work. 'Preview' is system wide so when set up for browsing mucks up all the other things I use it for, just so you know.

Suggestions please; free if possible!
 
download a trial of graphic converter. it can open pretty much anything

if it meets your needs, buy the non-trial version through the app store.
 
I'd look into Photo Mechanic from camera bits. It is ultra fast at browsing photos, you can extract / export to a central folder from there. It is how I quickly browse my archives on external drives, and it handles RAW faster than anything I have tested for such tasks.
 
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if you get it directly from the author's website, the price is fixed at 40$ or 35 E.
there's a disclaimer there that the app store price fluctuates due to the exchange rate

i'd try it first to see if it does what you need
 
A few random thoughts coming from someone who has spent the last seven years going through my own old prints and negatives from the early 70's into the 2000's when I started shooting less film, and going through 100 years of my grandfathers covering every media from 1850's tintypes to 1960's Kodachrome.

For myself, I found it impossible to deal with all the images using any form of Finder organization and Preview type scan. I had to come up with a workflow that would do at least some minimal form of organization and cataloging.

I am using a combination of Photos, Amazon and Smugmug. Photos to catalog anything that I consider to be "final" form, all my RAW's go to Amazon from scans or from SD card, JPEG's to Smugmug from scan or SD card. Then I know I have a backup and I can start to organize them from any system with a web browser.

It might be a challenge to find one application that handles every possible RAW format you might have. And some of the apps that can view a variety of images won't keep the original file metadata if you want to use them as a catalog program. For free software, you may want to have a look at Darktable as a possibility, it has pretty wide RAW format support.

Do you have an Amazon Prime account by any chance? For a first cut, upload a variety of the formats you have then see what Amazon chokes on. Then for the ones that can't be uploaded directly in native form, run them through Adobe DNG converter if you want to keep the files in RAW form.

Hopefully this gives some useful thoughts to ponder.
 
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You can stop looking. Either use Photo Mechanic (my choice) as @840quadra mentioned above, or use XnView MP, which is basically a copy of Photo Mechanic though it's not as pretty.

Both allow you to browse images (no importing, you just point the app at the folders the images reside in), and from there you can look a thumbnails like a contact sheet, zoom in, rename, sort (by file type, filename, date created, date modified, camera, lens, ISO or many other attributes), add metadata, export to any folder you want, etc. etc. etc. Photo Mechanic is a Swiss Army knife, able to open many file types, and I'm sure XnView does as well.

Photo Mechanic is kind of the industry standard in my world. But XnView is free!

Good luck and let us know what you do.
 
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Since the OP has mentioned that he "can't pay much," I'm not so sure that he'll be willing to fork out for PhotoMechanic, although I wholeheartedly agree that it would be a program which would perfectly suit his needs. I love it -- makes culling through a bunch of images after a big shoot just so much more quickly.

I know nothing about XnView, so can't suggest whether or not that, too, would do the job....
 
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Quite a few built in macOS ways discussed in this thread.

Adobe Bridge is free. Graphic Converter is excellent but not free and does much more than just browsing.
 
Some additonal free programs to manage and edit photos on a Mac (as well as other OS) are Darktable, Digikam, and to a some what lesser degree RAWTherapee. An excellent option are also Shotwell or - if e.g. you want to get a large photo collection from an input folder automatically placed in the proper directory for year, month and day - Phockup; the latter 2 require installation via Homebrew.
 
XNViewMP is small, fast, and it seems to work well with the natural hierarchy of folders/files.

As mentioned above, the downsides are that its interface is "clunky", but otherwise not intrusive, yielding a "simple viewing experience".

Also, it shows your files in their "master" (i.e., UNmodified) state.

But again, as a "simple viewer", it's as good as anything out there, and free.
 
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MacGeekYYC said:
A few random thoughts coming from someone who has spent the last seven years going through my own old prints and negatives from the early 70's into the 2000's when I started shooting less film, and going through 100 years of my grandfathers covering every media from 1850's tintypes to 1960's Kodachrome.

For myself, I found it impossible to deal with all the images using any form of Finder organization and Preview type scan. I had to come up with a workflow that would do at least some minimal form of organization and cataloging.

I am using a combination of Photos, Amazon and Smugmug. Photos to catalog anything that I consider to be "final" form, all my RAW's go to Amazon from scans or from SD card, JPEG's to Smugmug from scan or SD card. Then I know I have a backup and I can start to organize them from any system with a web browser.

It might be a challenge to find one application that handles every possible RAW format you might have. And some of the apps that can view a variety of images won't keep the original file metadata if you want to use them as a catalog program. For free software, you may want to have a look at Darktable as a possibility, it has pretty wide RAW format support.

Do you have an Amazon Prime account by any chance? For a first cut, upload a variety of the formats you have then see what Amazon chokes on. Then for the ones that can't be uploaded directly in native form, run them through Adobe DNG converter if you want to keep the files in RAW form.

Hopefully this gives some useful thoughts to ponder.
Click to expand...
You seem very dependent on the "cloud". Much as I admire the concept not needing to access from anywhere but my desk it seems a bit risky and clunky. My 'Pro' archive went when I sold up some years ago and this one is purely personal; to be honest I do not know what to do with it when I pop off this mortal coil. Strange to put all that time into something that is only of interest to my failing memory?
 
Reality4711 said:
You seem very dependent on the "cloud".
Click to expand...
The images are stored locally on mirrored drives, with a physical copy of the mirror kept off site. It is certainly possible that all three cloud providers could go belly up or have a failure at the same time, but I'm willing to take that risk.
 
Expos of 1969 said:
Still reviewing your options?
Click to expand...
No.

I have decided to leavewell enough alone.

The question being a diffecult one to resolve I decide to look at the reasons for doing it in the first place.

Subsequently I found little or no reason to make the store of mostly trivial images searchable or catalogued. I will have no need of that for myself, as time is mine to waste and there is no-one out there who isever goingto want them after my demise.

This purely a pragmatic decision with no sadness or emotional content. The fact is that my images have lost whatever value they may have had over time and they sit in a montrous sea of im agesacross the world that have much the same future.

So thank you all. I doubt there will be any other questiond from me in the time to come.
 
Reality4711 said:
No.

I have decided to leavewell enough alone.

The question being a diffecult one to resolve I decide to look at the reasons for doing it in the first place.

Subsequently I found little or no reason to make the store of mostly trivial images searchable or catalogued. I will have no need of that for myself, as time is mine to waste and there is no-one out there who isever goingto want them after my demise.

This purely a pragmatic decision with no sadness or emotional content. The fact is that my images have lost whatever value they may have had over time and they sit in a montrous sea of im agesacross the world that have much the same future.

So thank you all. I doubt there will be any other questiond from me in the time to come.
Click to expand...
Makes sense. Many of us seem to focus on taking, processing, organizing and safeguarding thousands of photos of a myriad of subjects. If one has children there is a possibility that after one's departure from this mortal coil they may wish to have a few photos for sentimental reasons. Other than those few, the rest are likely to be viewed as part of the estate to be cleared out.

Enjoy them yourself. All the best.
 
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I used Graphic Converter for perhaps 20 years. It’s solid, it works. However, I’m also cheap and when I don’t feel like opening Lightroom, I use Photoscape X. It's free, available on the Mac App Store, it’s opened anything I’ve ever thrown at it (I move from system to system with free abandon and have lots of Raw file types). Not the most polished app but it’s fast and one of those products that just works. Can edit as well. I don’t use the edit module.
 
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