The best Mac apps for 2020 By Mark Coppock October 9, 2020 If you’ve heard the phrase, “Once you go Mac, you never go back,” you know it holds true.
- Best Photo Viewer and Management Apps for Mac 1 Photos Photos is the in-built app for macOS that will let you do almost everything you are thinking of. From managing all the images to edit, you can do everything with the help of this beautiful app.
- Collect, organize, and privately share your photos and videos with the people who matter most. Just plug ibi in and download the app to get started.
Managing a huge gallery and organizing photos is a tricky business, even if you’re generally tidy, so it’s always a good idea to use some help. Especially when there’s software out there designed specifically to deal with an overload of pictures.
The only trouble with professional photo organizing software is that, much like any photo equipment, it’s painfully expensive. In this article we’ll suggest tools that tame your giant photo gallery without leaving a hole in your pocket.
Best photo manager apps for Mac reviewed
Rating | Name | Features | Info |
---|---|---|---|
1 | Gemini 2 | Best at keeping your photos cleaned up where they live. | Link |
2 | Photos | Organize your photos by album, people or places. | Link |
3 | Mylio | Syncs and organizes your photo library across all devices: Apple, Android, or Windows. | Link |
1. Gemini 2: The duplicate photo finder
The first step to getting your photos organized is to remove all of the duplicate or similar-looking images. Chances are when you take a picture, you don’t take just one; you take 15. All from different angles, maybe even with different poses. But rarely do you need or want all of them, so now they’re just taking up space on your Mac.
The easiest way to get rid of those files is to get a duplicate photo finder, Gemini 2. It scans your whole gallery and locates the duplicate or similar photos. Gemini 2 lets you quickly review and choose which pictures you want to delete. But the app also uses AI to select the best version of each image, and it will get rid of all of the copies with just one click of the Smart Cleanup button.
2. Photos: Best photo organizer on Mac
Here’s the biggest secret to good photo organization: master Photos. You might be thinking: seriously, is a native Apple app really any good? And you’d be surprised how much it is.
Since macOS Sierra, Photos has been getting makeovers and new features. In macOS Mojave, the app lets you organize content just by dragging-and-dropping it, and with Smart Albums, you can instantly group photos by date, camera, and even the person in them. At this point, it’s just a really good piece of photo management software.
3. Mylio: A free photo manager app
If you’ve been meaning to consolidate your photos in one place for years, Mylio will help you do just that. When you first start using the app, it offers to look for your photos on the current device, on an external drive, and even on your Facebook.
Once all the photos you’ve taken in your lifetime are imported, Mylio organizes into a variety of views. The coolest one is Calendar, showing you photo collections on an actual calendar. That way, you’ll quickly find the photos from your son’s first birthday, even if you forgot how you named the folder. Plus, Mylio offers a free mobile app, so you can access your photo library wherever you are.
4. Adobe Lightroom: Cloud-based photo editor and organizer
While Adobe Lightroom is probably best known as a powerful picture editor, it’s also loaded with tons of tools to help keep your photos organized. It stores your pics in the Adobe Cloud so you can access all of your albums and folders on another computer, phone, or even an internet browser.
One of the great things about Lightroom is that it makes non-destructive edits to your photos. So, you can revert back to the original image at any time, and you don’t need to create a duplicate just to preserve your picture.
5. Luminar: Organize and view pictures without importing them
If you have your pictures saved in various folders across your computer, then Luminar is the app you’ll want to check out. It shows you all of your photos without having to import any of them into a library. So you can start using Luminar in almost no time.
6. Adobe Bridge: Free photo library manager
You might be wondering why Adobe would make two separate photo managers. Aside from Adobe Bridge being free for everyone, it serves an entirely different purpose. Bridge is solely an image and asset manager. Unlike Lightroom, it doesn’t have any editing functionality.
So, what’s the point then? Where Bridge really shines is if you’re using other Adobe products, such as Photoshop or Illustrator. You can store and organize all of your pictures in Bridge and then open them in any Adobe program without creating a duplicate or searching through the thousands of files on your computer. Plus, Bridge offers a robust search tool making it a breeze to find the exact image you’re looking for.
Final word on photo management on Mac
There are basically two things you need to remember to bring order into your photographing life:
- Before you get to organization and management, be sure to unclutter your photo library. The easiest way to do it is with a duplicate finder, such as Gemini 2. Otherwise you'll be rummaging around in thousands of photos you don't even need.
- Photos, the native photo manager on a Mac, can accomplish everything you need to make organizing photos into groups and categories easy.
- Third-party tools can provide you with added functionality that’s missing in native macOS tools, like calendar view or managing photos right in the Finder.
Now that you know all the secrets to photo organization, Mac photography shouldn’t be that hard or that expensive. Not when you’ve got the right tricks up your sleeve.
These might also interest you:
Got Tons of Photos? Learn How to Manage Them Using These Apps for macOS
If the iOS is the best mobile platform, macOS should be the best platform for computer. Although it comes with so many features, you might face a problem when trying to open a bunch of images. The in-built app is not capable of showing images one by one like Windows Photo Viewer does. That will certainly create problem if you have recently migrated from Windows to Mac. However, to solve that problem, you can use these photo viewer and managements apps on your Mac. Not all of them are free but you may try them one by one to check which one suits you the most.
Best Photo Viewer and Management Apps for Mac
1] Photos
Photos is the in-built app for macOS that will let you do almost everything you are thinking of. From managing all the images to edit, you can do everything with the help of this beautiful app. As mentioned earlier, you can edit your images as it comes with all the options to do all the basic editing like color adjustment, color grading, crop, cut and more others. As this is an in-built app, you do not have to install it in your computer and this is available with all the recent versions of macOS. To find your images, you need to import images/folders in this app. The best thing is you can include iCloud images as well.
2] Adobe Bridge CC
Adobe Bridge CC is yet another awesome application that you can use to manage your photos without any major issue. Obviously, you need to download it to your computer. As it application has been developed by Adobe, you should not have any problem regarding compatibility or anything like that. This digital asset management software will let you organize your photos in different manners so that you can use it with other software. As this tool has been made by Adobe, you would not have any problem using it tool with other Adobe software such as Photoshop or Illustrator or Premiere Pro, etc. The user interface of this tool is pretty good and you should not have any issue even when you are using it for the first time. Some of the useful features of this tool are mentioned below-
- Bulk import, export and preview CC Libraries assets
- Edit photo capture time
- Export/ Import network cache
- Native PDF Output Module
- Easy upload of images to Adobe Stock so you can get royalties for your work
- Support for Retina and HiDPI displays with the ability to scale
- Automated cache management
- Publishing to Adobe Portfolio to build your personalized website
- Quick organization and stacking of panoramic and HDR images
- On-demand thumbnail and metadata generation
- Option to import photos and videos from your mobile device or digital camera on macOS
3] Picktorial
Photos App For Mac Download
Picktorial is another very intuitive photo management application available for macOS. Although it has a free edition, you can also opt for the paid version that costs $4.99/month. This is meaningless to mention that the paid version comes with all the unlimited features those you might not get in the free version. Like the Photos app for macOS, you can find a ton of options to edit your pictures. The best thing is it does support RAW photos so that you can edit maximum. Some of the handy features of this tool are as follows-
- Patch tool
- Skin smoothing
- Adjustment brush
- Linear gradient
- Radial gradient
- Highlights & shadows
- Curves adjustment
- Frames & styling
- Luminosity mask
- Color mask
- Edge aware brush
- Photo organization
- Comparable editing
- Metadata editing
And more others. The user interface of this app is more than good and you should all the options right in your fingertips. However, you might need to know a little bit of editing to get started with the editing panel of this tool. Otherwise, you can use it whenever possible.
4] Lyn
Lyn is a very simple and useful photo management or organizational tool available for macOS. Although it is a paid app, which costs $20, you can try the free trial so that you can know whether this app is suitable for you or not. Talking about compatibility, you can install Lyn on macOS 10.9 or later version. It does support almost all the image formats including JPEG, PNG, RAW, PPM, WebP and so on. It has a basic user interface and you can find all the images on your right-hand side and folders on the left-hand side. Talking about specific features, you can get a browser, sharing option, fullscreen viewer, metadata editor, maps, color correction, smart folders and so on. The best thing is you can import videos and play them accordingly. Apart from offline folders, you can import images from various cloud storage including Google Drive, Dropbox, Flickr and so on.
Best Photo Apps For Mac
That’s all! These are some of the best photo management or organizational tools for macOS. Hope they would help you manage your photos without any problem.