It doesn’t matter how much space you have on your iPhone, it’s never enough. And it doesn’t matter which fancy photo editing app you’ve bought for your iPad, it just never seems to do everything you want—or do it in the way that you’d want to do it.
At some point, you will find yourself downloading your photos from iCloud or importing them from your memory card, then sitting down to organize and edit them properly on your Mac. To do that, you’re going to need a photo management app for Mac that you can rely on.
How Do I Manage My Photos for Mac?
Mac users are spoiled for choice when it comes to photo management tools. Plenty of apps are competing to manage and edit your photos. Many will share a similar set of features but you’re going to be looking for a number of outstanding characteristics.
In particular, you’re going to be looking for ease of use. Life’s too short to spend hours learning how to complete basic operations like importing images and adjusting contrast. You want to be able to just sit at your desk and begin organizing, and editing. As you review the different photo management apps available for Mac, you’re going to be asking yourself a bunch of questions.
How do you move pictures from one folder to another? How do you import them from an iPhone? Can you use RAW, and what sort of custom presets are available?
You’re going to be asking yourself all of those questions even before you reach the most important question: how much is this going to cost?
What Is the Best Free Photo Management Tool for Mac?
You can leave the question of cost until last because it has an easy answer. A photo management tool doesn’t have to cost anything. There are plenty of free photo management tools available for Macs. Our own Picktorial, for example, is a leading photo management and editing app for Mac with a free version to get users started. It provides photo organization, full JPEG support, RAW and DNG display and a couple of local adjustments for each image. When your first priority is to get your photos off your iPhone or memory card and stored in your Mac so that you can find them easily, it’s a great place to start.
There are plenty of other options too. Flick through the App Store, and you won’t have to flick for long before you stumble over something that will let you create folders and move your photos around. Your Mac will have some photo organization features built-in, even if they’re not as easy to use or as versatile as a dedicated app.
What Is the Best Paid Photo Management Software for Mac?
The problem with free software though is that you always get what you pay for. Picktorial’s free service, for example, is generous as far as it goes but of course it still provides only a fraction of what paying users receive. For less than the price of a macchiato once a month, users get unlimited local adjustments, batch editing, priority support, and a whole lot more, together with a license that’s good for up to five devices.
The step-up from free to paid photo management costs little but it delivers a huge amount more.
That’s true to some extent for all the other paid photo management apps available. Most will provide some basic free functionality then charge for the full package. When you care about your images, it’s worth paying to manage and edit them properly, especially when the monthly cost of services like Picktorial is so low.
And once you’ve agreed to pay for that service, you need to get the most out of it.
Best Tips for Photo Organization for Macs
That means applying some basic tips for organizing your photos on a Mac. You should know the difference between a folder and an album, for example. Although you can place photos in either of them, only folders on a Mac can contain multiple, nested albums. So you could create albums for each of your photo trips, then can store all of those albums in a folder marked “Photo Trips” to keep them separate from your family albums or your wedding photos.
When you want to export an album from your Mac, you’ll be able to find it easily and move it quickly.
Similarly, if you take the time to tag the people in your photos and add location data, it will also be easier and faster to extract individual photos and move them.
The best tip for photo organization on a Mac then is to buy the right software and make the most of its features.