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Well, I've got my new MacBook Pro. Now, I'm wanting to get serious about organizing my photos. My first goal will be organizing a bunch of old scans by adding dates, locations and tags. After that it'll be adding tags and locations to my native digital photos that are already date stamped. It may take a few years to finish this but I want the best software that can make it as easy, and painless, as possible.
Personally, I use an really like Apple Aperture 3 for photo library management. You could start with iPhoto (free with your Mac); Aperture offers the ability to maintain separate libraries, spread across different drives if you like, and also gives you the ability to edit RAW files if you want. Aperture is $79 from the Mac App Store.
I have managed to set up Finder to have read and write access to the drive in my Windows 7 media center/server, where my 500+ Gigabytes of photos are currently stored. Can Aperture organize the photos there without needing to move them to my Mac? If it can (iPhoto can't) I'll purchase it right now.
Aperture can easily manage a library on a remote disk. Whether it can do so on a windows NTSF or FAT32 disk is another question. I'd try a quick google search.
On NTSF, I don't think so, unless you're running Paragon or something equivalent, that allow OS X to write to NTSF disks (otherwise they're read only). FAT32 would work.
But, if it's a remote disk, isn't up to his Windows system to read and write the files, and the Mac to say "hey, store this. Hey, fetch me that"? Assuming they speak a compatible networking system the Mac doesn't need to write to be able to write to NTFS.
If this doesn't work, everyone involved in networking at both Apple and Microsoft should be fired on Monday.
I agree with David, it is a mounted server drive, so the disk format should not matter. You can try with a test folder on your drive, and tell aperture to import the pictures, but leave the originals where they are.
Arnt
I missed, "I have managed to set up Finder to have read and write access to the drive...". If Finder has read/write access, so will Aperture.
Well, it seems to work but I've bogged it down importing. I'll report back when it gets past that...
Well, it works but it's incredibly slow. I've given up and have ordered a 1TB hard drive to install in the MacBook. I'm sure that'll make things a lot easier and faster.
I think then I'll just keep all of my photos on it, have a time capsule backup and then back up to my server. The good news is I've already organized them by month and year. The bad news is my scans are in the month and year they were scanned. I'm trying to pull them based on the absence of camera data to be sorted individually later.
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On a side note I ended up buying Office for Mac '11.
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Further side note; I just realized my copy of Photoshop Elements 9, that I got cheap and never got around to putting on my Windows machine has a Mac version included. I installed it and everything seems to work just fine.
Well, I got the 1TB Western Digital hard drive installed. Restoring the OSX Lion took a while using Internet recovery and my TimeMachine backup. I copied my photos, a little over four hundred gigs, from my server over wifi in about 20 hours. I then set Aperture to import them. I have no idea how long that may take...
Well, one thing worth noting is to not turn on your iCloud Photostream in Aperture before importing a mass amount of old photos, like I'm doing. It sent nearly fifty gigs through it! I move my iPhone and iPad photos out of the Photostream folder on my PC pretty often and was rather shocked when I noticed it was full of all of these old photos! I stopped everything and disabled the Photostream, for now.
Another thing worth noting is that when you import photos into Apertue they "swell up" or more likely it just copys them, I'm not sure but either way my 1TB hard drive showed full before the 400+ Gigs got done importing. So, I deleted everything, uninstalled/reinstalled Aperture and have set a chunk of my photos to importing straight from the Windows machine, rather than copying them to the Mac first.
Needless to say my difficulties are due to my having to learn OSX and Aperture at the same time. I love the Mac but still can't tell what it's doing some times. I'm not nearly as frustrated at learning how things work as I was when I switched to Vista. It hasn't crashed once. Overall I'm very satisfied.
the reason why the library swells is that Aperture creates previews (for faster viewing, and sharing with other apps like iMovie) for each file. You can specify in the preferences how big these previews should be, either in relative size (half of original) or absolute (800x600px). Reducing the size of the preview will reduce the size of the library. I chose to set it to my main monitor size, which was much less than the default ( I believe the default is half of original).
Feel free to ping me if you have questions.
Arnt
btw, disabling faces and places/locations will speed things up.
During import, you have the option of storing the images in the Aperture Library, or in their current location. If the pics are already on your HDD, the former option copies them (sounds like what you did), the latter option imports only a preview image and leaves the original as a referenced image.
Yep, I had copied them to my Mac and then imported them into Aperture. Based on the settings I deffinatly doubled my library size in doing this, making it too large to hold.
I left the faces/places turned on simply because I don't require the Mac for any other activities and just figured I'd wait it out. It did take days to import and complete the processing.
I imported the main part of my library, per-sorted into folders based on the month and year they were taken, into Aperture and let it copy them to my HD. I now have about 440GB free. I've got another 60GBs of old scans of which I'd like to digest later being I still need to edit the date taken/created info either before I import them or as I import them. My presorted scans were edited individually in a properties box in Windows. If anyone has recomendations on a better, faster or easier method of handling that task I would greatly appreciate the advice!