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

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.)

Serious hobbyist. I have taken over 30,000 photos over 7 years. Many on a Canon Powershot SX50HS. If editing is better with Photos that is encouraging.

Hi there

What would recommend as a photo editing app now?

thanks in advance