What is the best photo organizing app for a Mac?

[Jarhead5811]

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.

[neuroanatomist]

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.

[Jarhead5811]

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.

[thekingb]

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.

[neuroanatomist]

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.

[DavidEccleston]

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.

[ahab1372]

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

[neuroanatomist]

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.

[Jarhead5811]

Well, it seems to work but I've bogged it down importing. I'll report back when it gets past that...

[Jarhead5811]

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.