That was then; this is now. Over time, this software pick has morphed into a repository for photo management apps for the Mac. I'll continue to add photo-related apps to this collection, which will take it well past the 5 Photo Management Apps seen in the original title. To be included, an app must have some management function to help you keep.

1. Best Free Apps For Mac
2. Photos App For Mac
3. Best Photo Software For Mac

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. 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.

Best Free Apps For Mac

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In the age of affordable DSLRs, Instagram and ubiquitous photo-sharing on Facebook and other social networks, we're taking more photos than ever before.

The downside of taking all of these images is keeping them in order: There are over 18GB of photos on my iPhone alone and trying to figure out where a photo is from, when it was taken and what version is the best can be a complicated and stressful process. Fortunately, there are a number of great photo management apps for Mac and PC that make the process of organizing, sharing and processing your digital images a snap.

Still, figuring out what photo management tool is right for you can be a challenge. That's why we've rounded up some of our favorite apps and categorized them for specific types of users.

What's your favorite photo organization tool? Let us know in the comments.

For the User Who Loves the Cloud

While most users are familiar with Picasa Web Albums, Google's online photo sharing and storage service that's similar to Flickr, it's easy to forget that Google also makes a stand-alone photo management tool known simply as Picasa.

Picasa is a bare-bones photo-management tool that also provides simple photo-editing features. The real secret sauce with Picasa, however, is how easy and efficient it is to share those photos, edits and albums back to Google and Google+.

From a management perspective, Picasa can handle all the photos strewn across your computer, in addition to importing photos from your devices or memory cards. It's also easy to tag and organize photos based on facial recognition, location and date taken.

The best part of Picasa is the simple way you can sync those photos with the web. If you turn that option on, it happens automatically, meaning that you can seamlessly access whatever photos are on your computer from any device that can also access Google. I=This feature also makes it easy to email photos or albums to others.

While Picasa has great integration with Google+, there is a third-party plugin that makes it super simple to publish Picasa photos and albums to Facebook. Installing this plugin puts a Facebook button on the Picasa menu and makes uploading to the biggest social network a snap.

Picasa is free and is available for Windows and Mac.

For the Mac User Who Just Wants to Get Started

If you're a Mac user, one of the best photo management apps already comes pre-installed on your computer: iPhoto. First introduced in 2002, iPhoto was designed as a tool that would easily allow users to manage their digital photos and make digital corrections.

Over the last 10 years, iPhoto has become a robust tool in its own right. It's not as feature-heavy as Aperture or LightRoom, but it's a great tool for photographers who use a point-and-shoot or iPhone as their primary camera.

Our favorite part of iPhoto is how easy it is to create and manage photo albums. These albums can be tagged by location, face detection and event. You can easily share albums with others using Facebook, Flickr and iCloud.

Like Picasa, iPhoto supports a wide variety of RAW camera formats. Apple actually updates its RAW formats quite regularly, so even if you have one of the latest digital cameras on the market, it will work with iPhoto.

One of our favorite aspects of iPhoto is the beautiful print albums that can be created within the app itself. These albums are not only affordable, but the quality is terrific, too.

As a bonus, iPhoto '11 and Aperture 3 libraries can now be shared with one another. That means that if you like Aperture but your partner likes iPhoto, you can share one photo library with both apps.

The latest version of iPhoto, iPhoto '11 was released in October 2010. It is a feature of all new Macs, and can be purchased by itself for $14.99 from the Mac App Store.

For the Windows User Who Just Needs the Basics

A few years ago, it was hard to find a Windows equivalent of iPhoto (Picasa notwithstanding) — or, at least, a free equivalent. Fortunately, Microsoft started to offer its own photo management tool, Windows Live Essentials: Photo Gallery.

Photo Gallery is part of the Windows Live Essentials suite — think iLife for Windows — and as a photo manager, the app is quite robust. You can import photos from a folder, device or directory.

Just as Picasa can sync with Google Drive and Google+, Photo Gallery can sync with SkyDrive. The app also contains basic editing features and offers users a quick way to share to social networks like Facebook and Flickr.

One of the more unique aspects of Photo Gallery is its ability to build panorama images. There is also a 'Photo Fuse' mode that enables users to combine the best parts of two photos into one. This is useful if you have that jarring group shot where one person is blinking in one and someone is looking off to the side in another.

Windows Live Essentials Photo Gallery is free and requires Windows Vista or Windows 7.

For the Professional Apple User Who Has Non-Pro Family Members

In response to requests from users who wanted more control than iPhoto, Apple released Aperture, its photo-editing and management tool aimed at professionals and enthusiasts.

Unlike Picasa, iPhoto and Windows Live Essentials, Aperture empowers users with tools to make very specific and granular edits to their photos.

Because the edits are non-destructive (meaning they don't ruin the original image), users can get incredible results. Aperture allows for advanced features, such as lens correction, spot repairs, fine tuning of RAW settings and the ability to do tethered shooting from certain types of DSLRs.

The app also includes more consumer-focused features, such as the ability to share to Facebook and Flickr, the ability to create photo books, face recognition and location detection.

One of the best parts of Aperture is a recent addition: With the latest version, iPhoto libraries can be accessed in Aperture and vice-versa. This is important for users who want to share a library with another person, and for those times when you might want to make quick edits to some photos but dive deeper on others.

The one downside to Aperture is that, aside from the most recent library update, the program hasn't been given a major overhaul in over two years. It still supports the latest RAW formats, but the interface is getting a bit long in the tooth.

Still, at just $79.99 in the Mac App Store, Aperture is a great buy for the budding Mac photo enthusiast.

For the Photo Pro or Enthusiast Who Wants Lots of Control

Lots of professional photographers live and die by Photoshop for their image processing and editing needs. Over the years, however, Photoshop's focus has broadened and focused on more general graphic design rather than just photography.

As a result, there was a real need in the market for an Adobe product with a strong focus on photos, and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom was born.

First released in 2007, Lightroom has grown to become a staple tool for many photo enthusiasts and professionals. Like Aperture, Lightroom allows for users to finely control their images and make edits to things like color temperature, lens correction, grain and luminance. It also has great RAW support and can be used in tethered mode with popular DSLRs.

Photos App For Mac

The latest version — Lightroom 4 — offers location support, the ability to more easily recover from overly bright or overly shadowed images, and stronger video support. The software also now offers users a way to create photo books and to share videos to Facebook and Flickr.

One of the things we love about Lightroom is that it is extensible. There are tons of plugins for the program, as well as add-ons to make it easy to publish to photography sites, such as 500px, in addition to Facebook and Flickr.

Best Photo Software For Mac

Lightroom debuted at $299 back in 2007. Today, however, the latest version is just $149.99 for the full version. Users buying Photoshop CS6 or upgrading from earlier versions can get Lightroom for even less.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, AleksandarNakic