Q: Best replacement for iPhoto (now that it's no longer available)?

1 - iPhoto still works just great if you are up to date with version 9.6.1 - if you do not keep your system up to date see Can't Update iPhoto because it is not available in the App Store

2 - The best for almost all people is Apple's follow on Photos (one reason is that its editing capabilities are much stronger than iPhoto and with extensions new capabilities are constantly being adder by third parties) - since you obviously have not bothered to learn how to use it I expect you will loathe every program you try since all program are impossible to use if you do not learn o=how to use them - but in any case no one but you can choose the program that you like

LN

I'm with Larry, Photos is far more capable at editing photos than iPhoto is, more tools and better ones too.

Before offering advice on alternatives, and there are plenty, what kind of shooter are you? family snapper? Serious hobbyist? Shooting Jpeg on a phone? Raw on a DSLR? How many shots per year? 1,000? 10,000? 100,000?

Click on Adjustments and note the Add button in blue:

For what it's worth, I just used iPhoto as a photos database and, in my opinion, Photos is a horrible replacement.

I understand for others if you enjoy Photos, that's fine.

But I really miss the Events and the ability to edit photo metadata.  Albums really aren't a substitute for events, IMO, and not being able to edit the metadata is really a big loss -- lots of my pictures were uploaded from other sources (e.g., scans of old paper photographs, downloads from web pages with other people's photos), and have bad metadata.

So... if anyone has a replacement for iPhoto that handles those features, I'd love to hear it.

Thanks!

You can edit the metadata.

What's your budget for a replacement?

Me too.

I have a double bind - I run on a 5-year old MacMini, still clinging to the last OS that runs iPhoto.  For a year I've been experimenting with Photos and even Adobe Lightroom without success.  I need to update the photo archive application and the underlying hardware.

I had a 30 day trial of Lightroom.  It took 35 days just to convert my iPhoto library into what it used, and the convert failed at the end.  I should have used  smaller experiment set, but didn't have time to make it up.

I never edit photos, don't care about editing capabilities.  On the other hand 'events' like iPhotos are essential for me to keep rolls of pictures together, for adjusting metadata, etc.

I have a working set of about 6 cameras thus need to keep photos grouped by camera.  (Some cameras have the same model, so "smart albums" doesn't do the trick.)  I archive cameras of several family members, so there are maybe closer to a few dozen different cameras in my set.  I have scanned negatives going back 30-35 years too from old film cameras (and I keep the old notion of film rolls for them).  In total I have over 150,000 images and movies, about 1TB of data.  (That's probably not a lot to professional photographers.)  I have this in 740 events - since 2011, I keep each camera divided by calendar year to prevent hitting any event limits (I don't want to find out if there are any).

I do have albums of events where I combine all cameras at an event into one.  Time synching is an issue when this is done.

I change timezones frequently so I keep all the photos on UTC, synched to NTP.  The problem cameras are on cell phones that swap time zones with me, the other cameras suffer clock drift.  Without events, this becomes unwieldy (as each camera drifts differently).

Because my photos include film from the 1980, I have metadata comments describing the places and events.  It took me about 5 years to collect all that - a lot of work.  It's that work that I am afraid of losing.

I would just love a good photo archive package.  Forget the editing.

The other bind - I mentioned 2 - is that I feel the need to replace hardware.  My current MacMini has been running 5 years 24x7.  The OS is old.  I can't see any positive recommendations regarding Mac hardware - it seems everything is "old in the cycle."  I am beginning to wonder if Apple is abandoning the Macintosh.

In that case - my search is for anything out there - open source OS or Windows.  I realize the transition is going to be a lot of work no matter what, at this point.

Budget?  Not worried - managing my photos has cost me a lot of time already, far more than any software costs I can imagine.

As you don't do image editing then check out something like MediaPro SE. Robust organiser and strong on metadata.

https://www.phaseone.com/en/Products/Software/Media-Pro/Highlights.aspx

Not quite the same as iPhoto but much more capable. There is a learning curve.

I think your fears for the Mac are unfounded. The upgrade cycle is longer as these machines are mature now, so you don't get flashy releases every 6 months. It appears the Mini is dead and I'd suggest an iMac. make sure you get plenty of Ram, 8 gigs minimum.

I'm quite astonished at that 35 days to convert an iPhoto Library, mine had 60k+ images and was done in a few hours. There's something odd there.

I'll look into the suggestion (more pressed for time than anything else).

The gloomy outlook on Mac's came from seeing a MacRumor's site with "Don't Buy" for all but on Mac model, the other being "Neutral."  (I'd hope for more USB ports on a MacMini and, well, the usual "faster.")  Macintosh has entered the realm of "commodity" so I don't expect new features, just more capacity (disk or cpu).

FWIW - The slow conversion was probably from this - the machine doing the conversion worked about 1.5 days and complained it was out of memory - in reality it was that the cache directory in use filled the entire disk.  Realizing that took a while (nervously almost had to reset the machine to factory defaults because it was unresponsive).  To get the conversion going past that limitation I used an older USB disk that was lying around (probably USB 2) and empty, soft linked the cache out to it and let it run.  I bet that slowed the process greatly - but I had no other option.

(I wasn't encouraged to fix this - what I saw of Lightroom wasn't exciting me enough.)