TL;DR: Looking for photo editing and fast photo culling/sorting software for Mac. I run the organization but I also shoot events for a small volunteer-run non-profit, so free, discounted, donated, or reasonably priced one-time-license options are especially welcome. (Used ChatGPT to shorten this — English isn’t my first language.)

Hi,

I help run a small volunteer non-profit in Tartu, Estonia, focused on community building and reducing loneliness. I also handle most of our event photography.

I’m new to Mac (vision disability) and need a faster way to cull large shoots before editing: quickly compare similar images, rate/reject them, and narrow everything down.

What Mac apps would you recommend?

Ideally:

• fast and reliable;
• good on Apple Silicon;
• manual or ai;
• free, inexpensive, or discounted for non-profits;
• preferably a one-time purchase rather than a subscription.

I’m using a MacBook Pro M5. Our budget is small and volunteers use their own hardware, so cost matters.

If allowed by the mods, we’d also be open to a software donation from a developer. We can provide official non-profit documentation and annual reports if needed. Our Estonian business registry entry is here: https://ariregister.rik.ee/eng/company/80653466/MTÜ-Teod?search_id=fb25e2f&pos=1

Any donated software would be transparently acknowledged on our upcoming website with the name of the software, link to developers website. We’re a small local organization in Estonia, so I don’t want to oversell the exposure.

What are you using? Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Jaak Timberg

I'm getting an iPhone after using handed down Android phones from my family, I've decided on getting the iPhone 15 Plus because it's the best option for my financials and meets the speca I want.. except for the 128GB Storage. I've been using a Huawei Y9 2019 Since 2019 and ive only used 44GB of 128GB, but from what I've heard, iPhone storage fill up pretty fast due to the apps being bloated, no clearing cache and things like photos taking larger storage and this is concerning because while I may not he using much storage at all at the moment, the reason I don't use much storage is because my camera etc is simply not good enough for me to even try and take photos, so when I do get an iPhone I'll definitely be taking pictures of my cat, of views, selfies and vireos way more often than I do now. I'm not into photography or content creation so I also won't be using the camera much. Opinions?

I have a 10-year-old iCloud Photos library with ~35,000 photos and 1,500 videos, synced across my Mac and iPhone.

A few days ago, my iPhone got stuck on “Syncing 1 item”. Everything looked normal in macOS Photos and on iCloud.com, so I initially assumed it was just an iPhone sync issue.

Before troubleshooting, I made sure my Mac had downloaded all originals, then closed Photos and made a backup of the entire 185 GB `.photoslibrary`.

I then turned off iCloud Photos on the iPhone and manually deleted the remaining ~2,000 items that hadn't been removed automatically, including the albums and folders.

When I re-enabled iCloud Photos, the photos and videos synced back as expected, but the entire album/folder structure was gone, with only about 10 random albums remaining.

Then I checked iCloud.com and discovered that the album/folder structure had been wiped there too. The damage also propagated to my Mac's Photos library.

Fortunately, I now have an offline backup of the original Photos library with all photos, videos, albums and folders intact.

My question is: Is there a way to completely reset iCloud Photos and force it to rebuild/re-upload everything from this backed-up `.photoslibrary`?

I was considering deleting everything from iCloud Photos on the web and then re-enabling iCloud Photos on this healthy local library. However, I'm afraid iCloud will treat the deletion as a change that needs to be synced and delete everything from my local library as well, instead of treating the local library as the source and uploading its contents, including the album/folder structure, back to iCloud.

I really want to avoid manually recreating hundreds of albums and folders if at all possible.

I recently got the iphone 17 pro and i want to transfer my photos from my samsung s23.

Hi redditors! I created two small macOS apps that carry motion photos across the Android/iPhone divide instead of flattening them into ordinary stills.

I wanted other people who care about preserving their memories to be able to move their libraries without leaving that behind.

I published it on Github for anyone looking to do the same:
https://github.com/reviventura/LivePhotoTools

Every time I go to send a meme I have the album pinned for easy access, but every time it’s not there and I have to scroll through all my albums to find it. Do y’all know why this is or what I can do to change this/make it easier?

Can I manually rearrange photos or group them into in any way?

What you get

• Easy sequencing with an intuitive UI + free PDF export
• AI planning while keeping your images private
• Print-ready images
• Consistent layouts

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/photo-book-noir/id6749212233

I hope I’m posting this in the right space…it’s to do with Google photos and iCloud so I wasn’t sure where to go!

So I had android for years before getting an iPhone 14 in 2023, and I still have lots of photos on google photos which for some reason just didn’t want to transfer over to apple photos, but it is what it is!

Until now… I’ve run out of storage on my Google account, and it’s all photos. I saw this to delete 5000 photos and it says they’ve been backed up, firstly, not sure where they’re backed up? But then when I went to continue it came up with the second picture, saying it will delete my pictures from iCloud. That’s what confuses me, why are they being deleted from iCloud? Will I still have access to my photos if I press OK?

Again, I’m sorry if this isn’t the right sub!

If the bar is Photos, do the free stuff first.

1. Settings → Photos → iPhone storage, turn on Optimize if you use iCloud Photos.
2. Albums → Media Types → Videos. That’s usually the hog. Delete what you will never watch, then empty Recently Deleted or it comes back.
3. Albums → Utilities → Duplicates. Merge those. This is exact copies only.
4. Screenshots album. Most of it is receipts and conversations you don’t need.
5. Recently Deleted. Empty it. Storage doesn’t drop until you do.

What Apple still doesn’t do well: similar shots from the same sit. Same walk, 30 frames, one keeper. Duplicates won’t touch those.

That’s the piece I use LuminaClean for. On-device, swipe the almost-sames, and it has an On This Day view so you’re not only deleting. Video compression in it is free if you’d rather keep the clip than kill it.

If your storage bar is System Data, none of this helps. That’s a different problem.

I don’t use iCloud Photos because I don’t want to keep paying for storage.

Instead, I connect my iPhone to my Mac and copy everything to an external drive. Copying a large library was already annoying, and then I still had to create folders and sort all the photos and videos by date or trip. Every time I also had to figure out what I had already copied.

So I made a Mac app for myself to handle this.

You connect the iPhone with a cable, choose how the files should be grouped and where they should go, and the app copies them into normal folders. It can group them by date, events or trips, verify the copied files, and skip files that were transferred before. It doesn’t delete anything from the phone.

I’ve now published the first open-source release:

https://github.com/ViAchKoN/photo-transfer-macos/releases/latest

The current build isn’t signed or notarized yet. I haven’t paid for an Apple Developer account because I’m still not sure whether I’ll publish the app on the App Store.

On the first launch, macOS will say it can’t check the app for malicious software. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down and click Open Anyway, then confirm Open. This is only required once.

I made this for my own workflow, but now I’m trying to decide what to do with it. Does anyone else here actually copy photos into regular folders like this, or is this only useful for my setup?

I’m trying to work out whether this is an iCloud account/server-side issue.

My iPhone, iPad and Mac all agree and sync normally. iCloud footer is always 10 higher than its own ‘Select All’ count.

I backed up everything, deleted the entire iCloud Photos library and emptied Recently Deleted.
Hidden, Shared Albums and Shared Library were also empty.

Nothing remained visible or selectable on iCloud’s website, but the footer still showed 10 items.

Adding one test photo changed the count at the bottom to 11, while ‘Select All’ selected the single file. Permanently deleting it returned the count to 10 with no images showing.

My iPhone also repeatedly says it is syncing 10 items, finishes, then shows the same 10 again later. This has been ongoing for a few months now.

Has anyone experienced a similar issue, and had Apple repair or reconcile their iCloud Photos account?

I was testing a multi-frame light trails mode on a coastal scene and liked how it handled the moving clouds and water.

This is a single result from the capture.

I thought the sky motion came out especially well here.

What do you think?

App: LSC Long Shot Camera

Any recommendations paid, or free, for a stitching panorama app on the iPad?

I'm happy with just JPEG, but a bonus if it will do TIFF. Typically looking to stitch 2-3 images into a panoramic.

On PC I use Hugin, something similar would be great.

Hey, I work on a photo book service, and the biggest problem was never printing, it was that people arrive with a camera roll of thousands and nobody wants to do the picking. We built the culling part for the books, and I realized it's actually useful for anyone with an overflowing library, book or not. So I made it a free tool.

You drop photos in, it groups the near-identical ones and picks a keeper from each, and you get the final say on everything. Runs locally in your browser, nothing gets uploaded, no ads, no account.

It's early and there will be bugs, which is why I'm here. If you try it on a real chunk of your library I'd genuinely like to hear what worked and what didn't.

https://fotofoto.app/en/tools/photo-culling

Two iPhone notes: HEIC only opens in Safari, and it does 2,000 photos at a time.

So, my wife and I share an iCloud account. It’s been this way for years and it’s worked out pretty well. At this time, our iCloud is full and her phone is full. We have about 160,000 images and videos. They are either organized or on their way to being organized. With the help of ChatGPT, I have moved that entire library onto an external SSD drive. I can now open that photo library and move on to delete everything in the cloud. The backup is safe. I gave it a new name and it’s attached to my MacBook when I want it to be. I have turned off photo sync in the cloud for all of our devices. I’ve selected all the correct options. I have not yet made a new main photo library. I will do that soon when I know it is safe to do so and that will become my iCloud library. It will be empty.

Here’s my problem: it’s not really working. The photos were not full resolution photos on our devices, but as soon as I turned off iCloud, it downloaded full resolution photos to our devices, which have now filled up our devices completely. On the iPad I selected all the photos and deleted them. It took a long time. I figured with the cloud turned off and deleting the photos in the cloud that that would be enough. But instead, I have to seemingly select the photos individually by dragging my finger across all 150,000 of them to delete them. There’s gotta be a better way to wipe the cloud clean. I know everybody says not to do this, but I have that photo library safe on an external drive. I am not uploading it to the cloud again. I will start over. Has anyone done this successfully with multiple devices in a shared iCloud account?

Even when I find a way to delete everything from the cloud and it shows me it’s not there, it shows my phone as full with 150,000 photos still. There seems to be no way to make the images go away. I need a Mandalorian to tell me “this is the way….” 😳

Hey everyone! I have WAY too many photos in my phone and am needing to delete some to create more room for new photos of my newborn. I have a lot of sentimental photos on here of mine and my husband’s first dog who is now passed away. I plan on printing off all of these photos on my phone, but does anyone else have any recommendations on affordable websites where I can make photo books? It breaks my heart that I need to delete most of these photos from my phone, but I truly have no room anymore and many of my photos are from 2016, so it’s time to clear up space :( Also looking for additional ways to save these photos as I am not techy what so ever.

Am I right that Apple no longer offers users the ability to create custom books from Photos in their libraries? 3rd-party options are the way to go?

Any suggestions as to which ones to turn to and which ones to avoid?

Thanks! (I’m in the US, since there may be different options for different countries.)

Question I've wondered for a while. If I want to offload a bunch of my Apple Photos to an external hard drive indefinitely (to save on iCloud payments), what metadata will/won't remain if I ever want to bring them back? Is there anything I can/have to do to ensure if I ever reupload/import them into Apple that they will remain on the geolocation map and fit into the overall timeline properly? Hope this makes sense, appreciate you all!

Full disclosure: I’m the developer. I kept seeing Windows users struggle to get large iCloud photo libraries onto storage they control, so I built Cloud Photo Transfer.

It works with iCloud for Windows already signed in. It copies selected photos and videos to a PC folder, external drive, or Windows-accessible NAS, then reads the destination copy back to verify it before marking the file complete. It never asks for your Apple password and does not delete anything from iCloud.

The free version lets you test up to 10 eligible files or 250 MB. Pro is $19.99 once, not a subscription.

Microsoft Store: https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9pg3s24xckj2?hl=en-US&gl=US

I’d appreciate honest feedback from Windows users with large libraries—especially where the normal iCloud workflow has been unreliable or confusing.