On 25 June 2024 a man posted to the MacRumors forums looking for software to manage ten thousand personal photographs. Family pictures, many years of them, nothing professional. He had used iPhoto and then Photos, and he was done: "DO NOT want to 'curate' my photos within each library." The capitals are his. He wanted the pictures on his own disk, in folders he made himself, and he wanted to look at them.
Two years on, that thread is still near the top of what a search engine returns for the problem. That is a fair measure of how well the problem has been solved.
I read it this week alongside two of the articles that come up next to it. One is on the blog of a Mac app that renames photos with AI, the other on the blog of a photo manager built around face recognition. Both are titled some version of how to organize photos on a Mac. Both are good of their kind. Neither answers him though.
What the guides answer
One of the guides gives seven steps: rename the files descriptively, decide where they live, build a folder structure that will last, put dates in the names, keep a short list of tags, test that you can find something, back up 3-2-1. The other gives five: gather everything in one place, delete the duplicates, sort by date or event, throw out the bad frames, tag what's left.
Reasonable advice, all of it. It is also, every step of it, advice about getting organized. An intake procedure for someone whose pictures are in a heap.
The photos belonging to the guy from the MacRumors thread aren't. Three days into the thread he mentions, almost in passing, that he already keeps a backup export of everything out of his Photos libraries — by year, by category, in folders on disk, and has done for years. He has done what both articles recommend. What he wants is the step after the last step, the one where you sit down and look at a photograph. Every guide of this kind stops just before it.
If you recognize yourself here, you have some version of the same tree: years of pictures, on a drive you own. And every piece of software you have tried since has opened with the same word. Import.
Four places to keep the work
Read enough organizing guides and the useful pattern isn't in the advice. There are four answers, as I see it:
In the filename. 240627-CarShow_001.jpg. One poster in the thread does exactly this: the date first so the Finder sorts correctly, a word for what it was, and then a batch rename that numbers his favorites first so they float to the top of the folder. Nothing is more durable. A filename outlives the app that wrote it, the operating system it was written on, and every format migration since, and it needs no software at all to be read. It is also the smallest container there is: sixty-odd characters, one axis, and every word in it is a word you typed.
In the folder tree. 2019/summer/norway/. Free, legible to a stranger, and what many of us already have, including the man in the thread that got this post started. Its limit is arithmetic. A file lives in exactly one folder, so the moment a photograph is Norway and the kids and one of the ones worth printing, the tree has to pick one axis. And that's whichever one you cared about most on the day you filed it.
In an app's database. Photos works this way, Lightroom does by default, and so does the face-recognition app from one of the articles. This is where you get unlimited axes, because a real index can hold relationships. Ask it for every photograph of your mother, from any year, in any folder, and it will answer — which is a question no filename and no folder tree can be made to answer at all, however carefully you built them. The cost isn't the subscription. It's that the work and the app are the same object. Your pictures survive the app's death. What you decided about them does not.
Beside the file. A small text file carrying the same name as the photo and a different extension: an XMP sidecar. Adobe invented the format, and many browsers and culling tools mostly read it, though fewer apps do than its reputation suggests. It holds the rating, the keywords, the caption, the copyright and the develop settings, and it travels with the photograph — copy the folder to another drive and every decision comes along. (You can also write all of that into the photo file itself, which sounds tidier and quietly costs you in backups.) This is the one I build for, and I'll come to what it costs.
There is a fifth place, and it's one many family archives use: your memory. It works well, but it also fails.
None of these are wrong. But they aren't styles of tidiness. They are different answers to how much of the work survives the software.
Two meanings of organized
Twenty-five-odd replies in the original thread, two camps, no resolution. The reason is that both camps are using the word organized to mean different things.
One poster puts his side about as clearly as it can be put: "In my mind, each image is its own thing that should stand alone and not require a third party app in order to be found and used." For him, organized means the file carries what it needs. For the other camp it means the index knows where everything is. Both are true, and they lead to completely different shopping lists.
So the people recommending plain viewers, XnViewMP, Lyn, Bridge, GraphicConverter, even Preview, aren't recommending weaker software. They are answering the question he asked, which was a viewing question.
And the people recommending a manager with face recognition are answering the one question the other three places genuinely cannot. He runs into this himself, five days in, trying one of them: "the catch is that it scans photos then uses facial recognition to index by person. Ugh, I know that I am old school but I can't seem to get away from artificial intelligence…" He isn't being stubborn. The one capability he can't get from a name or a folder arrives welded to the thing he refused in his opening paragraph.
There is a bias here and it runs one way. Of the four places, two cost nothing and need no vendor. Two need an app, one permanently, the other not.
What the sidecar costs
I had used Lightroom since its 2006 public beta and left it this February with something over a hundred thousand frames to bring along. I chose the fourth place, sidecars, for all of them. So that poster's objection lands on me too.
Does a sidecar stand alone? Technically, yes. It's plain XML. Open one in TextEdit and you can read xmp:Rating="4" with your own eyes, with no vendor, no license and no format archaeology. Nothing in my archive is legible only to my own software.
But "you can read it in TextEdit" is just a technically correct answer. A rating you have to read in TextEdit is not a rating you use. What a sidecar really does is make the dependency soft instead of absent. You still need a reader. What changes is that you can swap readers without redoing the work, and that a reader which doesn't exist yet has an open, documented format to implement instead of somebody's private schema to reverse-engineer. Which apps read what is its own subject, and the answer is less tidy than the format's reputation — Capture One ships with sidecar syncing switched off, and Apple Photos never looks at one.
The filename beats the sidecar on one axis, and it's a real one: a name needs no reader at all. So the capture date belongs in the filename and the star rating doesn't. Put what you'll need in twenty years where the passing of twenty years won't «corrupt» it. Put what you'll change next week somewhere you can change it.
The whole workflow, card to print, with the sidecar doing the carrying, is written up separately; so is the longer argument for choosing this fourth place at all.
Finished, and unread
What the man on the forum needed wasn't another organizing guide. It was to stop organizing, and then something to open and read the photos already in the folders on disk.
Ten thousand photographs sorted by year and category is a finished archive. It is also, almost certainly, an unread one. Not for want of structure. For want of a surface. Opening a folder of eight hundred RAW files in the Finder is not looking at photographs, it's looking at a list. And nearly every tool that would show him the pictures wants to import them first, which means taking the decade of filing he already did and re-expressing it as someone else's index. I have the same problem at a hundred thousand, and structure didn't solve it for me either.
That is the app I ended up building for myself. Photo Archive opens a folder, shows you what's in it, writes ratings and keywords into sidecars beside the files, and has no catalog to import into. Which means it inherits the fourth place's limit exactly. Point it at a folder and it will cut that folder finely — by rating, keyword, date, file type, in milliseconds — and it can tell you nothing whatsoever about the folders you haven't opened. No index, no question that spans the archive, no every photograph of one person across ten years. That is the trade, and it is the same one the man on the forum had already made years before he went looking for software.
Ten thousand pictures, by year, by category, on his own disk. That man isn't disorganized. He has just never been shown his own archive by anything that didn't want to own it first.
Are there other apps that open, read and let you view your folder-organized photos? Arguably, several, some mentioned in this post. Are there tools that at the same time adhere to the XMP standard, and let you keep both metadata (ratings, keywords etc) alongside the edit/develop settings? Not so many.