Dear LazyWeb: Best photo management app?

$ cd ~meri > General > Dear LazyWeb: Best photo management app?

2012.12.14

General

In case any of you think that I’m convinced that All Things Cupertino are good, let me assure you that’s not the case. I use gmail’s web UI over mail.app. I use Chrome over Safari. I admit to using Contacts (formerly Address Book) and Calendar (formerly iCal) simply because the iPhone / iCloud interoperability is hard to beat. But, there are some things that the brainy little developers at 1 Infinite Loop come up with that drive me buggy. And iPhoto is about 3 of those things. So, it’s time for me to ditch iPhoto.

But what should I use?

My wish list:

  • Available for OS X.
  • The lower the cost, the better. But, if the absolutely best thing in the world isn’t freeware, I’ll certainly understand.
  • A UI that was developed sometime in the last decade.
  • Local management of photos without requiring that all photos be imported into some draconian folder scheme that means that you’ll never be able to actually get to the actual files again.
  • Also, I’d prefer that my files not be renamed. If any of you have ever received one of my ridiculously named photos, you know that I put a lot of time and effort into naming my files. I wanna keep them that way.
  • Tagging
  • Smart folders
  • I do kind of like the Albums vs Events concept. I just hate the unwieldiness of the iPhoto implementation. So, that sort of functionality, but, you know, actually functional.
  • Sharing to social media (mostly Facebook, Twitter, it’d be nice to have WordPress, not that WordPress has any sort of support for that)
  • Sharing to an online photo site (Flickr, Picasa, what else is out there? What should I be using, and why?)

Also, as you can imagine, I have a lot of photos. And they’re currently in my nemesis: iPhoto. The ability to import iPhoto libraries would be mighty handy.

So, share your wisdom with me. I know there are more than a few shutterbugs reading this. And a greater number of geeks. Give me the fruits of your research, so I don’t have to reinvent the wheel. 🙂

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