Photo Management Software

[Kell75]

So I have all my photos in a system that works for me in folders on dropbox that are attached to my individuals in reunion. I know backing them up in something else is a little redundent being they are originally on dropbox. However, I would like to also have them in a photo management software. My personal and immediate family photos are currently in google photos. That generally works fine, but I hate that I can't manually add faces to tag individuals. If Google doesn't recognize a face there, I can only put the name in a description, and defeats the purpose of just clicking on aunt mary's face and seeing ANY photos that she is in.

I like them in google photos cause I can access them from any device and they are also backed up there, easily sorted into events, etc. But I just don't know what it's such a hard thing for goggle to allow me to draw a box where one should be when google doesn't recognize it and name the person.

Does Photo allow this (I haven't used it in many years and versions)? Do you use google, Photo, something else to manage things in this way?

[msemans]

Hi Kellie
Some years ago I tried every photo management approach I could find. iPhotos was getting better (but not stable), but the rewrite to Apple Photos (long time ago now) was quite stable and has only gotten better.
My wife and I have six Apple devices and we use a single Apple ID to share share photos in an all Apple ecosystem.

I specifically dislike Google Photos (Google anything) because of of past questionable practices of content ownership (like gmail really isn’t free, they index your email to advertise to you and this includes using Google search).

So I use Apple Photos and shared albums if I want to share.
For Reunion I specifically export pictures and store as individual files within a Finder directory structure organized by people. Then I use Eaglefiler to to link pictures to people records in Reunion.

IMO using facial recognition and tagging people (on a platform like Google or Facebook) has privacy and security implications. If your desire is to keep those links within Reunion, using Eaglefiler to provide a metadata like link to everyone in the photo is doable.

[Bob White]

There is a section in the Help manual titled "Working with Apple's Photos App (and/or iPhoto)" I very strongly recommend that you read this section. In my opinion, the best practice is to have all the photos being used in the Family File in a single folder on your Mac. Modifying that idea to use a shared folder in your iCloud should work. The prime requirement is to keep the path from your file to the folder of photos always the same. (Note: I have not lost a single photo in more than a decade.)

[KirkS]

+1 for what Bob White says. I never have problems with my photos that so many people seem to experience.

I have my data on Dropbox. I have a top-level folder named REUNION that contains folders for Reports and Pictures. Works like a charm.