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.

1. Make it easy to find your favorite apps on your Apple computer. With the help of Launchpad, you can keep your favorite Mac App Store applications readily available. This video tutorial shows you.
2. Download Journey - Organize Photos for macOS 10.13 or later and enjoy it on your Mac. ‎Journey is a fast and powerful, yet simple to use app for browsing and organizing photos and videos, especially when you have lots of them. Browse through large galleries quickly, even if they are stored on external drives.
3. The apps begin to jiggle. To create a folder, drag an app onto another app. Drag other apps into the folder. You can have multiple pages of apps in the folder. To rename the folder, tap the name field, then enter the new name. When you’re finished, tap Done at the top right. To delete a folder, drag all the apps.
4. Otter is the Mac app for the note taker who hates typing. It’s an intelligent voice-recognition system and note-taking app that will help you transcribe your conversations, keep notes during meetings, and even take contextual notes to yourself in your own time. Best of all, it’s free to get started! Download: Otter.

Best photo manager apps for Mac reviewed

Lex uses a MacBook Pro, an iPhone 5, an iPad mini, a Kindle 3, a TiVo HD, and a treadmill desk, and loves them all. His latest book, a children's book parody for adults, is called 'The Kid in the.

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. 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.

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Deadlines are fun! They keep us on our toes. But what happens when you can’t find a piece of work you did a few years ago, that would save you a whole load of time - but you just can’t find it, buried amongst old folders and files in your Mac?! Instead of saving you time, you look everywhere and have to give up.

Best practices for organizing files on your Mac

We so often throw everything into separate locations and pray they can find it when needed, taking a hit-and-hope approach. That method has never worked for the New York Yankees, so it’s likely to leave you striking out too. If only there were a way to arrange folders and find files faster. An efficient, proven system to avoid all the wasted time, stress and extra effort. Thankfully, Setapp has a solution or two. We have an array of ready to install organizational apps to make life that little bit easier.

Let’s start with some simple rules for managing your files and folders:

Startup Apps On Mac

1. Clutter control: don’t put files on the desktop. Your desktop is supposed to be clean and display that amazing HD wallpaper you’ve got going on.
2. Find files faster: name your files and folders strategically.
3. Shortcuts to your project resources in one place to access them quickly. It solving the annoying part of switching between projects.
4. Tagging. Instead of—or in addition to—folder structures, try tagging files. The benefit of tagging is the ability to add multiple tags to a file. Without a strong folder structure, tags are all that’s keeping your files from getting lost in chaos.

Apps to find files faster

The Setapp collection of apps brings order to your Mac. Get the tools to seamlessly organize folders and files.

Clutter control: clean up desktop

Gather all the files and folders you want to keep on the desktop and put them in a folder or two for temporary storage if you’re referring to it regularly. If you want to make sure to keep your desktop clear, check out our Spotless tutorial. There is a rule to automatically clean off your desktop.

With smart algorithms such as the Autotidy feature, users can input ‘tasks’ which specify where particular files belong with an easy-to-use drag and drop system. The app will store your instructions and automate the process by scheduling folders to be organized at regular intervals.

There’s no limit to the number of automated tasks you can create, making for a spotless Mac. Users can teach the app to organize their images, desktop or individual documents, using a range of different parameters, e.g. filename, extension, file size, modified date etc. This gives users full scope to organize and locate files efficiently, without having to do the dirty work.

Putting your important documents and folders in the hands of an AI robot may be daunting, but Spotless is heavily regulated to minimize possible risks. Before submitting a new task, users receive a full preview of changes to consolidate understanding and ensure no errors are made, as well as having comprehensive and configurable conflict resolution rules to safeguard your files. With a fully editable dashboard, users can search engagement history to track what actions Spotless has undertaken and have the power to restore files or undo any unwanted changes.

Spotless is reminiscent of the swan analogy – your Mac is the swan, gliding smoothly on top of the water with ease. Spotless is the legs, powering away beneath the surface, laying the foundations for your relaxed drift up-stream. Sounds lovely, doesn’t it?

Find files faster

Keep in mind that you can search for files using folder names - the more specific, the more quickly you’ll find what you’re looking for. Think about saving an invoice. Do you think invoice1.pdf is a good name? Probably not. July invoice.pdf is not any better. So when you’re naming that invoice, think about how you might look for it. Probably:

• By date (I want the July 2018 invoice)
• By company (I want the ABCom invoice)
• By type of document (I want a invoice)

So a good name would allow you to look at the files in a folder and right away see what each file is without opening it. It would give you things you can use to search. So a good file name, in this case, could be 2017-07 ABCom invoice.pdf
The same concept applies to folders. Setapp has a good bulk renaming app which perfect for any kind of file renaming including music and photo files.

Project shortcuts

The next step is to use workspaces to manage multitasking.

The nature of the macOS system doesn’t particularly lend itself to multitasking. Having to jump between the countless browser tabs open alongside your documents and any impending emails isn’t ideal, especially when you have a long to-do list. The fact that Workspaces allows users to add any resource to the workspace, along with handy widgets like a bookmark bar, makes it easy to work on web-focused projects and to handle online information simultaneously. With a fully customizable platform, Workspaces is built to evolve along with your tasks. If projects are surplus to requirements, the archiving feature stores all your old workspaces into one easily-accessible document, which can be made visible again at any time. Furthermore, adding new resources couldn’t be easier, with a one-click system inherent on encouraging efficient, fluid productivity.

Workspaces is a simple Mac organizer, facilitating and simplifying the art of multitasking. Through a designated ‘workspace’, you can access all relevant resources needed for the task in hand – web pages, emails, documents and more. By saving all the relevant documents to your workspace, you’ll eradicate all that wasted time hunting for files and, with the inbuilt task list, you’ll be able to switch exercises with ease.

What about pics organizing?

We can all appreciate the perils involved in keeping your images organized. From those videos of unforgettable nights-out to the endless array of selfies, the camera roll can be a mighty mess. For so many of us, photo hoarders who love collecting and storing photos, keeping them arranged is a near enough impossible task. Or was.

Picture this, an app that helps you manage your entire gallery, accessible at your fingertips, without the need to delete any images. Using a powerful photo manager, Emulsion effortlessly arranges your images in a well-structured, consistent and beautiful way. The Live Folder feature allows images to remain in their primary location, while simultaneously storing them with automatic syncing.

How To Organize Apps On Mac

Furthermore, the app utilizes macOS features seamlessly. By placing all images together in one easy to access panel, users can sort pictures by metadata, tags and notes, complete with full-screen options, quick look and gestures. Through tagging, Emulsion can sort images by people, locations, time and even colors, demonstrating the impressive AI behind the app.

How to use tags to organize files in macOS

Alongside the apps to keep your things organized and easy to find, Mac has its own tagging feature that lets you color code files and folders. You can use this to group your items so that you’re not scrolling through endless lists.

Tags work for files and folders stored on your Mac or iCloud account and are easy to add.

How to tag files and folders in macOS?

To tag an open file, hold the pointer to the right of the title and click on the arrow, followed by the Tags field. Choose a tag from the list, or enter a new tag.

To tag a file in the Finder or on your Mac desktop, select the item that you want to tag, open the File menu and choose a color. If you want to choose a different tag or enter a new tag, click on Tags for additional options.

To tag a newly created file as you save it, click on File > Save and select the Tags field in the Save dialog. Enter a new tag or select one from the list.

Items can also be tagged from a Finder window by selecting a file or folder and clicking on the Tags button.

How to find tagged items in macOS?

Once you’ve tagged your items you can easily find them by opening up a Finder window.

From the finder window, enter the tag name or color in the search field and locate your file from the list. Alternatively, you can ask Siri to find the file for you by asking it to, “Find files with a blue tag” or something similar.

To see every file with a particular tag, you can click on the tag color in the Finder sidebar. You can also choose which tags you want to see located in the sidebar by going to Finder > Preferences and choosing the appropriate tags.

To sort items by their tag, go to View > Show View Options and click the checkbox next to Tags. Click the Tags column in List view and the files will be arranged for simple viewing. Click on the column name again to revert the order back to how it was.

How to edit tags in macOS?

To edit a tag that you’ve already created, go to Finder > Preferences > Tags.

From here you’ll be able to change the color by clicking on the color button and selecting a new option and change the name by clicking on the tag’s name.

To add a new tag, click on the + button.

How to remove a tag in macOS?

If you want to remove a tag from an item, all you need to do is Control-click the item, click Tags, select the tags that you want to remove, and hit Delete.

Removing a tag from your Mac is equally straightforward. Go to Finder > Preferences > Tags, select the tags that you want to remove and click on the - button.

Gone are the days of folder hunting and head scratching. With Setapp subscription, you can get these apps plus a whole host of others, bringing an end to the constant categorizing confusion. Start your free trial with Setapp today and discover a world of app innovation.

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

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