Hello! This is both a question and commentary, as I'm hoping to finally solve a dilemma that's bothered me all year.
I have a library nearing 1 million photos and videos of all formats (including RAW and heic) that I've built over several years. Nowadays, I edit with Capture One, which is fantastic, but not very useful for importing (lack of options), culling (slow render), and especially cataloging (breaks down with a year's worth of photos). I do not yet have a NAS, and store everything on two USB HDDs — broke artist with ancient mac arch etc etc.
So began the quest to find software that could organize and show my photos. What's the use of a million photos if it takes too long to look at any of them? My POIs were importing (copying files from source to library, sorting by year/month, detecting duplicates), culling (rate, color tag, keywords, and preview speed in full view), and catalog (fast gallery thumbnails, albums, sorting, small data size). Here's what I've found thus far:
-Lightroom: Does it all, but I hate it. Overpriced, lacks some professional features, doesn't play well with a lot of non-adobe apps, no duplicate finder, slow-ish.
-PhotoMechanic Plus: Excellent cataloging, okay culling and import. Quite expensive, doesn't let you assign custom keyboard shortcuts, weird-ish licensing system, hard to tell what data you have in your RAW photos (can you save under/overexposed parts? will it look good in B&W?)
-ACDSee 10 for Mac: Eh? Seems to work well, but has some... quirks. Always shows both jpeg and raw when shooting linked. Feels underdeveloped still, or like a paid version of Darktable.
-FastRawViewer: Amazing for culling, shows full RAW data and lets you view with basic "effects" like shadow boost of B&W. Lacks keywords or any kind of cataloguing or importing.
-XnViewMP: Previews seem fast enough, but software seems slow and sometimes has issues when scrolling past videos. Unsure how usable it is for importing.
-Mylio: Offers a lot of features and a nice UI for free, but also seems oversimplified, has a lot of weird restrictions, doesn't offer a good way to switch to my backup drive if my main fails, and seems to read the wrong capture date on many of my Panasonic RAW photos. I'm also worried it won't stay free forever.
-PhotoSupreme: Supposedly similar to PhotoMechanic? I could not get it to work very well, seems to lack the import to year/month folder feature so I didn't spend a ton of time with it.
-DigiKam/DarkTable: (similar experience with both) Worked okay, but both software and previews were slow. It felt like my catalog file was set up wrong and slowing things down, but everything I checked looked correct. I tested these a while ago now, maybe they've improved or I should change something?
-PhotoStructure: I'm hopeful? Seems to just be for cataloging and deleting duplicates, but paired with FastRawViewer and C1, I'm okay with that. I'm running this now and will update... so far looks like it's going to be slow, unfortunately.
-Adobe Bridge and similar DAMs without cataloging: Too slow and complex to navigate for more than like 20 pictures. At least FastRawViewer lets you see subfolder contents, unlike most of these. Great if you do low-batch work, but I shoot a lot (concerts, etc) so it's a non-starter.
-Network DAMs, ie Daminion: Sounds great. Doesn't work for me per above...
I'm left baffled. How are there all of these almost-good options at vastly different price points? Like, smash together ACDSee and FastRawViewer and I'd be a happy camper, but no. I know development is hard and I'm not saying any of these are bad software, but, surely there's something that covers these relatively basic bases?
For myself, I see two path: Drop money I don't have on PhotoMechanic Plus, or make do with FastRawViewer and C1 with a minimal catalog. I feel like there has to be a better option though. Does anyone have tips? A program I haven't tried, or settings to make the above work betetr?
Thank ya!
P.S. I'll update the above as I learn more!
This is the inherent problem of taking a million photos. There is NO solution to this problem that won’t take many many hours to implement, if it’s even practical anymore.
Step one is turning off the burst mode of your camera.
Step two is adopting a proper filing structure when you import your photos. Not a library, but a specific place on your storage medium with a directory tree. You should at least be able to immediately drill down to a specific date with a specific camera.
Step three is tagging as aggressively as possible when you import the images. Every single image should have at least one, if not three or four tags, so that you can find those images by tag(s).
If you’ve done steps two and three, then your problem is only volume, which is solved by not taking 600 pictures of the same things (step one).
If you have not already done steps two and three, then that’s what you have to do. On your old photos and from here out. Nothing further will really matter or be helpful until you’ve done that.
A possible way to approach it, if you did do step two, is to divide the whole into manageable chunks. Start with the current year. Get that under control all by itself. Then, if that wasn’t an unmanageable amount of time, go one year, or six months, or whatever, further back. Get everything tagged and properly organized. Etc.
But no software solution is going to do any good if you don’t have this done.
I agree with step two, but otherwise, I feel like this is a rather pessimistic approach. Unless your camera is collecting dust, a million pictures isn’t unrealistic for anyone with a camera. I’ve been working in photography for years, and I back up my phone photos to the same database. Burst mode is often a necessity, I’ve met way more people who use it too seldom than too much. Also, all of that is just cataloging. Importing, culling, and mobility are crucial to many photographers as well. And cataloging is absolutely a software-solvable problem. Lightroom and Photomechanic both have it figured out, in addition to numerous network applications. Tagging is great, but you will inevitably loose and forget photos if that is the only way you identify them. A timeline of all photos is essential to many of us who capture a wide variety of styles.
Yes, it will take hours to generate a catalog. But once done, every image is immediately viewable, as opposed to spending hours searching every time you want to find an old picture. We can have different preferences, but for me a software catalog is the way to go.
Did I say “no catalog?” I don’t think so. Of course you need one, but it has to be narrowly defined. A file cabinet with 10,000 drawers is next to useless.
Burst mode of not a necessity for many photos at all. It IS a necessity if you have the modern belief that photography is about capturing some objectively perfect shot that exists, but much be captured for some reward. So you take 50 pictures in 5 seconds of the same exact thing and figure you’ll go through them to find the one that happened to catch that elusive perfect moment. This is simply lucktography. It is meaningless because you, as the “photographer” have done nothing but drive your camera out to some spot, and aim it at something. The camera does everything else. You don’t even have to do the thinking here. It is literally just taking a snapshot with a $5000 Instamatic.
I’ve been taking pictures for probably 45 years now. And I have no where near a million pictures. Also, my ratio of throw-away bad pictures to keepers is nothing like 100:1. You make your choices in this game.
Your wording implied using catalogs exclusively as a editing tool, not a viewing/reviewing tool. I’m never going to argue against good file management, but that is largely irrelevant to this thread.
I’m assuming you’ve never shot pictures of a low light band, wildlife in action, stop motion film, sports at night, a high budget wedding, pets playing, an eventful trip, or anything similar? Any of those necessitate hundreds or thousands of pictures unless you have a really low bar for “hit.” If burst rates were useless, they wouldn’t be the major talking point of every new camera that comes out. I’m not here to argue. If you shoot all your pictures in a nice and controlled setting, awesome, but we work in completely different worlds. Also, as I mentioned, I use my library to store non-professional and video work too. The size of it is a necessity of the work I do; that’s a simple fact, and totally independent from skill.
No one has a 100% hit rate in every situation, and even if they did, they have every right to take a lot of pictures.
Actually, I’ve done most of those things. Even back in film days before autofocus was invented. You DO NOT need everything automated at 10fps to take pictures, good pictures, even great pictures, of just about anything. If you do, then you don’t know what you are doing. That’s just a fact.
Yes, modern technology can be a great help and does wonderful things, but people were taking great pictures long before even the most rudimentary in-camera light meters came about.
The problem is in the modern belief that there IS a perfect picture that must be captured. That it exists, and that photographers will miss it forever unless they use every tool at their disposal. There isn’t. There are only the pictures you take. That YOU take. Not that the camera takes. Not that Luck takes. If you can’t take a great wildlife picture without auto-everything at 10fps, then you need to go back to First Principles and learn photography again. There is a reason why so many modern photos are technical masterpieces, but have no heart in them. The reason is that nobody took them.
I’m glad you chose to slander a fellow professional for your false belief of their techniques instead of actually help answer the question I and others are asking. If your happy with your process, keep it, it’s probably a lot more similar to mine than you are assuming. But I don’t care. I happen to agree that “burst mode” is often overused, but it doesn’t make anyone an idiot incapable of photography as you claim.
Nobody “slandered” anybody or even used the word idiot. Grow up.