As the official Mincey Plantation Mac Administrator, I can tell you with great certainty that we members of the Georgia Mincey Clan have far too many digital photos. Many tens of thousands of photos from many cameras are scattered hither and yon between our respective Macs.
What we started doing a few years ago helps the mass of photos to be a bit more organized. We segregated the family and tourist photos from those that are more the result of some serious photography sessions. There was a time when iPhoto and then Photos was fine, then we went to multiple libraries, now we’re using a professional level photo and image browser to segregate the better photos from the family riffraff.
The app we use now is called Lyn and the idea behind Lyn is focus and speed. It’s an elegant image browser that’s very fast and lets you view nearly every popular image file format (JPEG, TIFF, JPEG 2000, PNG, TGA, RAW, HDR, OpenEXR, PPM, animated GIF and any other image file format supported by OS X).
Does this look familiar?
Lyn’s benefits are obvious. Simple toolbar across the top that also supports social media sharing options. Photo or image libraries reside in the left sidebar so organizing and viewing photos is as natural as the Finder.
Lyn’s claim to fame is speed and professional level tools, including the ability to work on Macs with multiple displays and multi-core CPUs.
At the consumer friendly end of the spectrum you can use Lyn to view a photo slideshow fullscreen, even with music, or convert and rename in batch mode, manage photo metadata, and much more. The editing inspector features filters and effects, and there’s even an option to geotag photos and edit locations.
Lyn even comes with a color histogram and tools to adjust colors on any image.
Not every Mac user with thousands of photos will need what Lyn does. iPhoto or Photos will work just fine. But if speed, specific photo organization options, and extras are the requirement, Lyn works great. It’s amazingly fast, even with many tens of thousands of photos– it also pulls photos from iPhoto, Photos, Aperture, and Adobe Lightroom.
If managing photos is important, Lyn is highly recommended for Mac users who need a little more speed and additional features not found in Photos, and especially useful if you need to segregate your family photos from your high quality photographs.