Photo Library For Mac

1. Mac Photo Library Management
2. Photo Library Mac Taking Up Space
3. Photo Library For Macbook Pro
4. System Photo Library Mac

PowerPhotos works with the built-in Photos app on your Mac, providing an array of tools to help you get your photo collection in order. Create and manage multiple libraries Instead of being limited to putting all your photos in a single library, PowerPhotos can work with multiple Photos libraries, giving you many more options for how to.

The Photo Library software helps in the same. It catalogs the photos based on date and creates albums and has powerful search capabilities to retrieve the photo. The photo and video library software is available for download and some are free of cost. This is a software available on the Mac. The software allows to browse, organize and play. Back up the library in Photos on Mac. Even if you use iCloud Photos, it's important that you always back up your library locally using one of the following methods. Use Time Machine: After you set up Time Machine, it automatically backs up the files on your Mac. If you ever lose the files in your Photos library, you can restore them from the Time Machine backup. The obvious idea would be to create a backup of the optimized library on an external drive that you connect from time to time to your Mac and set as the System Photo Library.

Managing a huge gallery and organizing photos is a tricky business, even if you're generally tidy, so it's always a good idea to use some help. Especially when there's software out there designed specifically to deal with an overload of pictures.

The only trouble with professional photo organizing software is that, much like any photo equipment, it's painfully expensive. In this article we'll suggest tools that tame your giant photo gallery without leaving a hole in your pocket.

Best photo manager apps for Mac reviewed

1. Gemini 2: The duplicate photo finder

The first step to getting your photos organized is to remove all of the duplicate or similar-looking images. Chances are when you take a picture, you don't take just one; you take 15. All from different angles, maybe even with different poses. But rarely do you need or want all of them, so now they're just taking up space on your Mac.

The easiest way to get rid of those files is to get a duplicate photo finder, Gemini 2. It scans your whole gallery and locates the duplicate or similar photos. Gemini 2 lets you quickly review and choose which pictures you want to delete. But the app also uses AI to select the best version of each image, and it will get rid of all of the copies with just one click of the Smart Cleanup button.

2. Photos: Best photo organizer on Mac

Here's the biggest secret to good photo organization: master Photos. You might be thinking: seriously, is a native Apple app really any good? And you'd be surprised how much it is.

Since macOS Sierra, Photos has been getting makeovers and new features. In macOS Mojave, the app lets you organize content just by dragging-and-dropping it, and with Smart Albums, you can instantly group photos by date, camera, and even the person in them. At this point, it's just a really good piece of photo management software.

3. Mylio: A free photo manager app

If you've been meaning to consolidate your photos in one place for years, Mylio will help you do just that. When you first start using the app, it offers to look for your photos on the current device, on an external drive, and even on your Facebook.

Once all the photos you've taken in your lifetime are imported, Mylio organizes into a variety of views. The coolest one is Calendar, showing you photo collections on an actual calendar. That way, you'll quickly find the photos from your son's first birthday, even if you forgot how you named the folder. Plus, Mylio offers a free mobile app, so you can access your photo library wherever you are.

4. Adobe Lightroom: Cloud-based photo editor and organizer

While Adobe Lightroom is probably best known as a powerful picture editor, it's also loaded with tons of tools to help keep your photos organized. It stores your pics in the Adobe Cloud so you can access all of your albums and folders on another computer, phone, or even an internet browser.

One of the great things about Lightroom is that it makes non-destructive edits to your photos. Wget for macos. So, you can revert back to the original image at any time, and you don't need to create a duplicate just to preserve your picture.

5. Luminar: Organize and view pictures without importing them

If you have your pictures saved in various folders across your computer, then Luminar is the app you'll want to check out. It shows you all of your photos without having to import any of them into a library. So you can start using Luminar in almost no time.

6. Adobe Bridge: Free photo library manager

You might be wondering why Adobe would make two separate photo managers. Aside from Adobe Bridge being free for everyone, it serves an entirely different purpose. Bridge is solely an image and asset manager. Unlike Lightroom, it doesn't have any editing functionality.

So, what's the point then? Where Bridge really shines is if you're using other Adobe products, such as Photoshop or Illustrator. You can store and organize all of your pictures in Bridge and then open them in any Adobe program without creating a duplicate or searching through the thousands of files on your computer. Plus, Bridge offers a robust search tool making it a breeze to find the exact image you're looking for.

Final word on photo management on Mac

There are basically two things you need to remember to bring order into your photographing life:

1. Before you get to organization and management, be sure to unclutter your photo library. The easiest way to do it is with a duplicate finder, such as Gemini 2. Otherwise you'll be rummaging around in thousands of photos you don't even need.
2. Photos, the native photo manager on a Mac, can accomplish everything you need to make organizing photos into groups and categories easy.
3. Third-party tools can provide you with added functionality that's missing in native macOS tools, like calendar view or managing photos right in the Finder.

Now that you know all the secrets to photo organization, Mac photography shouldn't be that hard or that expensive. Not when you've got the right tricks up your sleeve.

These might also interest you:

When people lose their wallet, phone, or computer, it's often not the money they miss, but the photos. This shouldn't be the case! With recent developments in accessible and affordable tech, there are lots of easy and convenient solutions to ensure that even if your devices get lost, stolen, or damaged, you still have your photos to enjoy.

It's likely that you have multiple photo libraries scattered across different devices, which makes managing your files and backups extra difficult. Don't fear! Below are quick catch-all solutions to reconfigure your mobile device, cloud storage, and computer back into backup harmony.

Secure your photos with Setapp

It's an all-in-one package with 170+ apps that helps you sync iOS and macOS content, as well as solve many more tasks on Mac.

Where Are Photos Stored On Mac?

Most Mac and iPhone users used to the iPhoto library may be asking, 'Where are my photos on my Mac now?' Truth is, with the OS X 10.10.3 (Yosemite) release, the new Photos app has effectively replaced iPhoto for Mac. So the first step now would be to open Photos from your Dock or Launchpad and take a look at Albums to see what you got in there.

Just so you know, the iPhoto app will still work if you already have it installed on your computer. So in the battle of iPhoto vs Photos, it doesn't make a huge difference which one you use. What's important is that, if you use both, you may have different content in separate locations.

Within the Apple ecosystem, iCloud is the default cloud storage system that keeps a version of your all photos online. What's great is that by using Photos or iPhotos, it automatically uploads the photos you take and stores them on its servers.

iCloud allows your iPhone, Mac, or another Apple Storage device such as an Apple Time Capsule to be an extension of others. But don't rely on it too heavily as this type of setup is sync-based, which means that if you delete a photo on one device, it'll be deleted elsewhere.

For that reason, if you're serious about not losing your precious pictures, here are some quick and convenient ways that might just save the day.

How to backup Mac to iCloud

Let's start with the bare minimum photo backup job. With pictures in the Photos app being automatically backed up to iCloud, what about photos in other libraries? Or what happens if you don't use an iOS device to capture your life?

There are quite a few locations where photos might live on your Mac. Take a look at the Pictures folder, hard drive locations, Desktop, and Downloads folder. The key is to have anything you wish to upload to iCloud moved to the iPhoto app.

How to backup photos on Mac to iCloud:

1. Go through the list of locations above for photos that aren't already in your iPhoto library

2. Drag and drop the content into the iPhoto app

Now do the reverse. Duplicating iCloud and creating an offline backup will allow you to put your photos on an external hard drive or into other backup systems, thus making it easier to create multiple backups and save you from any disaster.

Unfortunately, photos do take up a large amount of storage on your Mac, which can lead to your computer slowing down. This is just another solid reason for why you should transfer your photos onto an external hard drive.

How to download iCloud photos to Mac:

1. Open the iPhoto app

2. Click Photos under the Library heading in the menu bar and select Preferences from the dropdown or use the keyboard shortcut Command + comma

3. Navigate to the iCloud tab

4. Check the box next to Download Originals to this Mac

There you have it — every photo that gets sent to the iCloud will download itself onto your Mac as well. And now that your photos are saved on your Mac, you can use Time Machine to transfer them to an external hard drive.

How to backup MacBook photos to external hard drive

Apple clearly recognizes the importance of backing up your photos, and that's why your Mac comes with its own backup app Time Machine already installed.

The benefit of using Time Machine is that you can automate your backups, which could include apps, music, photos, emails, documents, and system files. To create backups with Time Machine, all you need is an external storage device.

To perform a photo backup using Time Machine:

1. Set up and connect your external hard drive

2. Select Use As Backup Disk when prompted by the pop-up window

3. Time Machine will now begin a backup of your Mac

Here's the biggest secret to good photo organization: master Photos. You might be thinking: seriously, is a native Apple app really any good? And you'd be surprised how much it is.

Since macOS Sierra, Photos has been getting makeovers and new features. In macOS Mojave, the app lets you organize content just by dragging-and-dropping it, and with Smart Albums, you can instantly group photos by date, camera, and even the person in them. At this point, it's just a really good piece of photo management software.

3. Mylio: A free photo manager app

If you've been meaning to consolidate your photos in one place for years, Mylio will help you do just that. When you first start using the app, it offers to look for your photos on the current device, on an external drive, and even on your Facebook.

Once all the photos you've taken in your lifetime are imported, Mylio organizes into a variety of views. The coolest one is Calendar, showing you photo collections on an actual calendar. That way, you'll quickly find the photos from your son's first birthday, even if you forgot how you named the folder. Plus, Mylio offers a free mobile app, so you can access your photo library wherever you are.

4. Adobe Lightroom: Cloud-based photo editor and organizer

While Adobe Lightroom is probably best known as a powerful picture editor, it's also loaded with tons of tools to help keep your photos organized. It stores your pics in the Adobe Cloud so you can access all of your albums and folders on another computer, phone, or even an internet browser.

One of the great things about Lightroom is that it makes non-destructive edits to your photos. Wget for macos. So, you can revert back to the original image at any time, and you don't need to create a duplicate just to preserve your picture.

5. Luminar: Organize and view pictures without importing them

If you have your pictures saved in various folders across your computer, then Luminar is the app you'll want to check out. It shows you all of your photos without having to import any of them into a library. So you can start using Luminar in almost no time.

6. Adobe Bridge: Free photo library manager

You might be wondering why Adobe would make two separate photo managers. Aside from Adobe Bridge being free for everyone, it serves an entirely different purpose. Bridge is solely an image and asset manager. Unlike Lightroom, it doesn't have any editing functionality.

So, what's the point then? Where Bridge really shines is if you're using other Adobe products, such as Photoshop or Illustrator. You can store and organize all of your pictures in Bridge and then open them in any Adobe program without creating a duplicate or searching through the thousands of files on your computer. Plus, Bridge offers a robust search tool making it a breeze to find the exact image you're looking for.

Final word on photo management on Mac

There are basically two things you need to remember to bring order into your photographing life:

1. Before you get to organization and management, be sure to unclutter your photo library. The easiest way to do it is with a duplicate finder, such as Gemini 2. Otherwise you'll be rummaging around in thousands of photos you don't even need.
2. Photos, the native photo manager on a Mac, can accomplish everything you need to make organizing photos into groups and categories easy.
3. Third-party tools can provide you with added functionality that's missing in native macOS tools, like calendar view or managing photos right in the Finder.

Now that you know all the secrets to photo organization, Mac photography shouldn't be that hard or that expensive. Not when you've got the right tricks up your sleeve.

These might also interest you:

When people lose their wallet, phone, or computer, it's often not the money they miss, but the photos. This shouldn't be the case! With recent developments in accessible and affordable tech, there are lots of easy and convenient solutions to ensure that even if your devices get lost, stolen, or damaged, you still have your photos to enjoy.

It's likely that you have multiple photo libraries scattered across different devices, which makes managing your files and backups extra difficult. Don't fear! Below are quick catch-all solutions to reconfigure your mobile device, cloud storage, and computer back into backup harmony.

Secure your photos with Setapp

It's an all-in-one package with 170+ apps that helps you sync iOS and macOS content, as well as solve many more tasks on Mac.

Where Are Photos Stored On Mac?

Most Mac and iPhone users used to the iPhoto library may be asking, 'Where are my photos on my Mac now?' Truth is, with the OS X 10.10.3 (Yosemite) release, the new Photos app has effectively replaced iPhoto for Mac. So the first step now would be to open Photos from your Dock or Launchpad and take a look at Albums to see what you got in there.

Just so you know, the iPhoto app will still work if you already have it installed on your computer. So in the battle of iPhoto vs Photos, it doesn't make a huge difference which one you use. What's important is that, if you use both, you may have different content in separate locations.

Within the Apple ecosystem, iCloud is the default cloud storage system that keeps a version of your all photos online. What's great is that by using Photos or iPhotos, it automatically uploads the photos you take and stores them on its servers.

iCloud allows your iPhone, Mac, or another Apple Storage device such as an Apple Time Capsule to be an extension of others. But don't rely on it too heavily as this type of setup is sync-based, which means that if you delete a photo on one device, it'll be deleted elsewhere.

For that reason, if you're serious about not losing your precious pictures, here are some quick and convenient ways that might just save the day.

How to backup Mac to iCloud

Let's start with the bare minimum photo backup job. With pictures in the Photos app being automatically backed up to iCloud, what about photos in other libraries? Or what happens if you don't use an iOS device to capture your life?

There are quite a few locations where photos might live on your Mac. Take a look at the Pictures folder, hard drive locations, Desktop, and Downloads folder. The key is to have anything you wish to upload to iCloud moved to the iPhoto app.

How to backup photos on Mac to iCloud:

1. Go through the list of locations above for photos that aren't already in your iPhoto library

2. Drag and drop the content into the iPhoto app

Now do the reverse. Duplicating iCloud and creating an offline backup will allow you to put your photos on an external hard drive or into other backup systems, thus making it easier to create multiple backups and save you from any disaster.

Unfortunately, photos do take up a large amount of storage on your Mac, which can lead to your computer slowing down. This is just another solid reason for why you should transfer your photos onto an external hard drive.

How to download iCloud photos to Mac:

1. Open the iPhoto app

2. Click Photos under the Library heading in the menu bar and select Preferences from the dropdown or use the keyboard shortcut Command + comma

3. Navigate to the iCloud tab

4. Check the box next to Download Originals to this Mac

There you have it — every photo that gets sent to the iCloud will download itself onto your Mac as well. And now that your photos are saved on your Mac, you can use Time Machine to transfer them to an external hard drive.

How to backup MacBook photos to external hard drive

Apple clearly recognizes the importance of backing up your photos, and that's why your Mac comes with its own backup app Time Machine already installed.

The benefit of using Time Machine is that you can automate your backups, which could include apps, music, photos, emails, documents, and system files. To create backups with Time Machine, all you need is an external storage device.

To perform a photo backup using Time Machine:

1. Set up and connect your external hard drive

2. Select Use As Backup Disk when prompted by the pop-up window

3. Time Machine will now begin a backup of your Mac

If you can't see a pop-up window right away, then open Time Machine from System Preferences and click Select Backup Disk manually.

Depending on how many photos you have, the transfer process could take some time. So give yourself a pat on the back while you wait. Although, you should consider some potential hazards just before you tick this task off the to-do list.

Mac Photo Library Management

Time Machine could sometimes be fairly superficial and you might encounter some issues if you ever need to recover and restore you Mac. For one, Time Machine requires an Apple specific HFS+ filesystem to store backups, so it won't back up files that don't conform to this format. Additionally, the backups Time Machine creates aren't bootable, which means that you can't actually restore your device to the exact state you had before.

How to transfer photos from Mac to external hard drive

If you decide not to use Time Machine, there's a simple workaround for your iPhoto library. To move photos library to external hard drive, you just require a little drag-and-drop magic.

How to backup photos on Mac manually:

1. Plug in your external hard drive and follow the setup instructions if you have not done so already

2. Open a Finder window and select your external hard drive from the Locations in the sidebar

3. Launch the iPhoto app from the Dock and move it just so you can see both the Finder window and the app window

4. Press Command + A to highlight all photos

5. Drag and drop the highlighted photos onto the external hard drive window

For those who have more than one iPhoto library, it's important to create backups for all of them. As mentioned above, look in your Pictures folder, all drives, Desktop, and Downloads folder for any rogue images that you want to have backed up.

How to backup a Mac completely

Photo Library Mac Taking Up Space

Picture this predicament. You've put all of your eggs in one company's basket, and they have a data breach. Now your files and folders are potentially compromised in the hands of someone else.

This is why you should consider using trustworthy options to store additional backups. A robust backup app like Get Backup Pro offers secure diversified storage. As well as backup, archive, disk cloning, and folder sync software for Mac, you can use Get Backup Pro to quickly create bootable backups so you can get back up in minutes.

The aptly named Get Backup Pro takes securing archives to the next level. Using encryption types AES-128, AES-256, Blowfish, or Triple DES, it gives you an option to protect all your backups with a password.

How to backup a Mac with encryption:

1. Open Get Backup Pro

2. Click the plus button to add a new backup project

3. Enter the project name, such as 'Photos,' and hit OK

4. In Select A Destination, choose your external hard drive

5. Check the box next to Encryption and select one from the dropdown menu

Additional photo backup and recovery

To complement Get Backup Pro, Disk Drill is recovery software that lets you resurrect deleted or lost files and folders, yes, including your photo library.

Bring back whatever is lost

If you've accidentally deleted an important photo, make sure you have Disk Drill installed on Mac. This powerful app will revive anything.

As well as it being another place to store backups of your Mac, Disk Drill has a handy duplicate remover so that you aren't clogging up precious memory space in your drives. Before you get straight into a photo backup, make sure you allow Disk Drill to make changes to your drives in your Security & Privacy System Preferences.

How to create recoverable backup files:

1. Open Disk Drill

2. Select Macintosh HD

3. Hit Recover

4. Hey presto! Disk Drill will start creating a bootable backup file right away.

Taking the extra time now to protect what's important will save you from future heartbreak. What's more is that the apps mentioned above, Disk Drill and Get Backup Pro, are all free to try on Setapp.

Setapp is the app subscription that has your back. As well as offering life-saving tech, it has over 150 apps that will make your Mac-life what you always dreamed.

As Setapp is free during a 7-day trial, you can enjoy browsing through the app categories where you will find plenty of apps that will make you say, 'Oh I could really use that!'

Meantime, prepare for all the awesome things you can do with Setapp.

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Photo Library For Macbook Pro

System Photo Library Mac