Photo Organization and editing

Have you tried the built-in app Photos? I've been using Photos for several years, and I've recently been scanning old family pictures, and the organizing tools work great for me. (Of course, this is the Photos community site, so most of us are long time Mac users.) Photoshop does some heavy duty manipulation of images, but for making most pictures look like they are supposed to, Photos works quite well. Photos can also open other editors like Photoshop for editing while staying within the Photos organizing system. I use some other editors occasionally to do more local stuff like Burning and Dodging. This has a bit more information:

Photos User Guide for Mac - Apple Support

This is an introduction, and it's a bit glitzy for my taste, but the links may be helpful. The best thing is to add some pictures and try it out.

Photos is a non-destructive editor, which means that the original pictures are never altered. As you edit a picture, Photos keeps track of your steps and then re-applies them when you later look at them. So, while there is always the original file, there are no actual edited versions taking up storage space. (It keeps thumbnails and some previews to make loading pictures quicker.)

If you have an iPhone, Photos can work with iCloud to synchronize pictures so images you take with your phone quickly show up on the Mac, and edits you make on the Mac are applied on the phone.

And, of course, Photos is free!

Photoshop Elements is a photo editor, but not a manager. It will probably be a great addition to the Photos.app that is coming preinstalled on your Mac. Photoshop Elements offers many tools for adding graphic composition to a photo, while the Photos.app is strictly photo centric and does not offer many tools to combine parts of different images into one.

In addition to the user guide you may want to have a look at this user tip: New to Photos? Some Considerations on How to Design your First Photos Library in Photos 5.0. I wrote it some years ago for an older system version, but it explains how the different tools in Photos relate and for what purpose they are intended.

The user guide is explaining the graphical user interface in Photos, but not the general idea, how to break it to our needs. The most important part of Photos is a relational database, that is storing and managing our photos and videos for us. It offers many predefined views of our photos automatically, we can retrieve our photos in many ways, by the date they have been taken, by the date they have ebeen adde, by the location, by the objects or people in them, and many more, all common, widely used search criteria. but Phos cannot know, why we took certain photos, or the projects they belong to, what a photos means to us. For our own, personal projects we have to design our own organisation, on top of the existing database structure. For this we can use, albums, folders, keywords, titles, captions.And we should plan our own structure in advance, once we understand how Photos is working. If you decide to use Photos, take some time to plan the design of your Photos Library or libraries.

[ ... all that léonie said and ... ] you can ask the community here for ideas on organization-- we do it differently for our own needs, and it's fun to see how others try to stay organized.

In Elements, Adobe Bridge is the organizer, but I have no idea of its features as opposed to Photos.

That said, iPhoto and Photos have met all my needs and I have never bothered to look at Bridge.

Thank you, for pointing this out. You are right Keith, I have never bothered to learn how to use Adobe Bridge and simply forgot that it exists.

I think a lot of people do. 8^)