Strange situation I find myself in on Mac OS X. Photographic management was, of all things, what I thought Mac OS X would be better at than Windows XP. But it isn’t. At least not for my situation.
iPhoto is proving to be largely useless (as you can see above) for what I want while Apple Aperture and Adobe Lightroom are too expensive and too complicated. Finder fails to beat even Windows Explorer.
My situation is that I use a Canon EOS 20D to produce RAW files which I use Adobe Photoshop to edit. I store my photographs on an external hard-drive in my own folder structure. I have close to 500gb of photos now from several years of photography.
The camera is great, Photoshop is still brilliant and my folder structure works well for me.
Where I am having problems is when I want to choose what photos I want to edit. Windows Explorer on Windows XP with the RAW plugin was strangely good. It loads directories of files quickly, caches thumbnails intelligently and lets me send a RAW file to Photoshop with two clicks. It provides both thumbnails and full-screen previews for finer detail.
Finder on the other hand provides thumbnails but when you want to do full screen previews it loads the Preview app. which is dog slow with RAW files. It takes a few seconds to flip between two files and doesn’t cache meaning a flip is always slow, not just slow the first time.
iPhoto on the other hand does cache and does it well. The new compare feature in the full-screen view is excellent. iPhoto handles 9000 files with ease.
But it has two major problems. To send a file to Photoshop you have to exit the full-screen view, back into the normal app view and right-click and Edit in External Editor. Why not just right-click in the full-screen view?
The other is that the cache is static and is stored on your local disc. A thumbnail cache of 500 gigs of photos is itself large, about 20gb.
iPhoto made that cache on import but I thought that if the cache was deleted it would repopulate it as you loaded photos. But no. It doesn’t. Once you delete the cache iPhoto just sits there showing a view like above and doesn’t regenerate thumbnails or full-screen previews. It does go off and fetch a preview of the file you are viewing in the full-screen view but it doesn’t cache that preview, making flipping useless.
iPhoto is obviously for much smaller photo libraries though I can’t see it remaining like this with people totting 10 megapixel pocket cameras.
Aperture and Lightroom are brilliant applicatons except they try too organise your files too much. I found far too much data was stored in Lightroom and it was a chore getting it out. That makes it a poor choice for long-term photo management. Aperture is just too expensive.
So I am left with no workable way of going through a few hundred photos I may have taken in a day.
All I want is a fast, intelligent RAW previewer app. Something that doesn’t try to tell me how to arrange my photos and makes sending files to Photoshop easy. Too much to ask?
