Is there an alternative to the Apple Photos application?

Hi -

There are many alternatives - but few are free, and I'm not aware of any that offer free photo sharing either. I think if you don't like the way photos works, you'd be better off separating the management and editing of photos from the sharing of them.

There are many sharing services most or all of which will do a much better job than Photos shared albums. See here for a discussion of the main options:

https://www.tomsguide.com/uk/best-picks/best-photography-sites

For alternatives for management and editing, the obvious choice is Lightroom. Others you should investigate are On1 Photo raw, Capture 1, and Mylio.

Less obvious is the open source (free) darktable.

I use Lightroom 6.14, Photoshop CS6, MPEG Streamclip, QuickTime Player Pro 7 (in Mojave) and GraphicConverter, Final Cut Pro, exiftool (in Big Sur) to edit images and movies and their metadata. I use Photos only as a viewer and an aid to (flakily...) sync to iOS devices. Edited originals and RAWs in plain folders in external disk backups.

A few years ago Google Photos was the best free or even commercial solution I found for my noncommercial photo publishing needs which should support: searchable captions and keywords, dates, location maps, subscribed user comments, an alert to subscribed users when new images are added to the shared album, admin rights to selected users, no sign-in needed for anonymous users, downloadable original quality media for any user, cross-platform web browsers and mobile apps.

I then also tried Dropbox, Apple and Microsoft cloud, Picasa, Flickr and SmugMug. But I am not perfectly happy with Google Photos either:

+ Other users can subscribe to the shared album and receive notifications when it is updated. Also non-subscribed users can view the album via an URL. Subscribed users can optionally comment or "like" individual photos. Trusted users can granted admin rights to the album (I have not tried how well this works in practice).

+ The albums can be viewed via a computer web browser or a mobile app (works fine in iOS).

+ Users can view the albums as web pages with multiple photos automatically neatly arranged on one page, clicking an image zooms into individual image mode with an optional neat sidebar showing the scrollable Caption text (I haven't tested if it uses "[IPTC] Caption-Abstract" and/or "[XMP-dc] Description"), EXIF date and time, image name, resolution, size, and location map (clicking the map in Google Photos opens a more detailed Google Maps in another page. It would be nice to have an option to just zoom into smaller map with satellite view and keep that zoom factor and view).

+ The photos can be stored in original quality (within Google account limits) with all metadata.

+ Subscribed and nonsubscribed users can download individual images or the whole zipped album with original quality images.

Google Photos has some major drawbacks:

- Low-resolution images do not automatically fit the window. It is possible to zoom in with cmd/ctrl + but then other GUI elements get too large. And the user might not know this zoom shortcut.

- Captions are automatically imported and neatly displayed but linebreaks are ignored and moderately long Captions are clipped, so linebreaks must be clumsily re-edited or whole Captions pasted back.

- It is not possible to view Keywords.

- Captions, dates and locations can be edited in Google Photos, but the edited metadata does not download with the images! This is why I must clumsily maintain the album in GraphicConverter and periodically remove and re-send some or all images to Google Photos so other users can download the images with updated metadata (I must then also remember to re-paste long Captions or edit the linebreaks back)! "Google Takeout" with json files and exiftool would be a workaround but so clumsy that my audience would not use it.

https://exiftool.org/forum/index.php?topic=11064.0

- jpg EXIF dates older than 1902 are displayed incorrectly so images older than that need clumsy workarounds (eventhough EXIF spec supports them). Even in newer dates sometimes incorrect date fields are used for sorting and display instead using correct EXIF dates. Sometimes time is displayed and sorted as 0.00 unless metadata is rebuilt and images re-imported.

Movie dates need extra effort for pre 1970 and pre 1921 dates, dates older than 1902 flaky. Movie Captions are not automatically imported and must be separately pasted.

- I miss an option to share non-image files inside the shared album. As a workaround I have an image with a Caption text URL pointing to a Dropbox .xls file.

- The worst: It is not possible to search Captions or Keywords! Can you believe there is a Google product that can't search!! Search is only possible at the Google Photos main window, not inside albums. To do a Caption or Keyword search (I don't know if it searches both) users have to add the album to their own photos and do the search there, or download and open the album in other apps like GC. This is a great pity because I have an album with dozens of carefully picked Keywords per image. Currently other users don't have an easy access to filter those 1000 images via Keyword searches.

Here is an example of a Google Photos album also containing some movies:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/B8FoHCDkTyfZ8j4p8

I briefly tried Dropbox, Flickr and Photos.app web sharing but they didn’t fit those requirements at all. Here is an example of a Flickr album when I tested them:

https://www.flickr.com/gp/144002348@N07/357h30

A non-exhaustive list:

Adobe's Lightroom (the Cloud version. In some ways a souped-up version of Photos.

Adobe's Lightroom Classic - think Aperture plus 7 years development

On 1 Photo Raw - a cross between Lightroom and Photoshop, you'll need the ON 1 360 add-on for cloud

CaptureOne - probably best for pro or serious hobbyist users

Mylio - a good alternative for a similar user base to Photos.

Nikon NX Studio, if you're a Nikon shooter

Exposure X6 - aims at being a Lightroom competitor

If you upgrade to macOS 11 Big Sur, you can sort shared albums (by newest or oldest first, or by he date added).