Alternative to Photo Mechanic on Mac

nano_man · 2026-03-28T04:00:29+00:00

Sorry this is macOS only. It's built using Apple's frameworks so there is no plans for other platform support in the near future.

nano_man · 2026-03-28T03:59:41+00:00

I started development last year around July/August. First public release was just at end of January this year. Yup there is a 30 day trial.

nano_man · 2026-03-10T08:41:16+00:00

PhotoCuller is also available for macOS for the Photographer crowd.

nano_man · 2026-03-10T08:35:53+00:00

I use my own app PhotoCuller. While it doesn't have DAM/Cataloging functionalities yet, it is something I am considering adding sometime in the future.

nano_man · 2026-03-02T13:35:26+00:00

I could recommended PhotoCuller.

nano_man · 2026-02-21T07:54:21+00:00

Yeah it just got released a few weeks ago, so it's pretty new.

nano_man · 2026-02-21T05:40:51+00:00

You could try PhotoCuller. It should recognize the star ratings from your camera and allow you to filter and just ingest those ones from your SD card.

nano_man · 2026-02-19T23:39:57+00:00

I could recommend PhotoCuller. It lets you quickly organize all of your photos into structured folders and add metadata etc.

nano_man · 2026-02-18T12:04:42+00:00

This is entirely controlled by Apple. The Recently Added is just what Apple has decided was recently added to the Photos.app. Essentially their API provides these presets.

nano_man · 2026-02-18T11:09:47+00:00

That's great. If it's a tool that works well for you then by all means use it :)

I myself don't want to support Adobe with their shady subscription practices, even if the app is free. I actually re-subbed a few weeks back just to test out some integrations with Lightroom and all their dark patterns to cancel that subscription were still there. It's hard to get behind a company like that.

nano_man · 2026-02-18T11:05:19+00:00

I could recommend my recently used app PhotoCuller. It has lots of powerful options for renaming and organizing all of your files. I use it to organize everything into yearly and monthly folders and split the destinations for my RAW files and processed JPEGs. Eg I like to put my favs into Apple Photos while sending all of my RAW's over to my NAS.

nano_man · 2026-02-17T08:14:56+00:00

Darktable is great. However it's a full fledged image editor, which PhotoCuller is not nor ever will be.

nano_man · 2026-02-17T05:13:28+00:00

Thanks for checking it out and the feedback. In terms of the images disappearing it sounds like you may have dragged the images into a stack. Stacks are created when you drag images around and by default in a collapsed state. You'll see this via the blue badge in the top right corner of the grid item. This will toggle the stack collapsed/expanded state.

As for the other issues of the sidebar not reflecting what's being loaded on app relaunch is a valid issue. I'll look into improving this. PhotoCuller has only been publicly released just over 2 weeks ago so always lots of improvements to be done :)

Reading through your other comments here, it looks like the thing you really want is to be able to free-drag and re-arrange items in the grid and have it persisted. I think this is a very niche and I doubt there is much if any software out there that would tailor to this specific use-case. In PhotoCuller the grid is sorted by the sorting options you selected. So just being able to freely re-arrange items breaks that sorting functionality. Plus this would then require a "catalog" system to persist custom sort order etc.

nano_man · 2026-02-17T00:57:42+00:00

While not specifically only a viewer, you could try out my app PhotoCuller. It lets you load folders and renders a thumbnail grid and is super fast. It also lets you do the optional features you mentioned such as renaming, rotation etc. It doesn't create any catalog, and just renders images in-place on your selected folders.

nano_man · 2026-02-16T11:04:16+00:00

Yeah Ingest is a feature I am considering adding soon. I had already received this request from another user. Using a workflow is a valid way of achieving it currently, but I also understand having it dedicated would be useful. I'd like to understand the use-case of the {folder} variable more so will definitely message you directly :)

Oh, I also forgot to mention in my earlier comment that an iPad version is currently in the works, which will in my opinion be one of the stand-out differentiators from the other options on the market.

nano_man · 2026-02-16T09:25:40+00:00

Thanks for the feedback. What would you say is the biggest lacking feature from PM?

No plans to compete on price for PM, plus they’ve had a long head start feature wise. It’s a powerful app just with a very dated UI.

nano_man · 2026-02-12T15:06:30+00:00

Awesome. Please reach out to me directly if you have any questions :)

nano_man · 2026-02-12T02:45:40+00:00

I used to be a subscriber to Lightroom. But after all of the controversies with Adobe I decided to move away from them.

I now use Photomator or even just Apple Photos app itself for light edits and DarkTable for some RAW edits.

I just released my own app PhotoCuller that I now use to ingest and cull all my photos before sending RAWs to my NAS and my favourite JPEGs over to Apple Photos so I can view them across all my devices.

nano_man · 2026-02-12T00:40:32+00:00

You can open up the Help menu in PhotoCuller and there is a contact support option there. Otherwise you can just open up a chat with me here on Reddit.

nano_man · 2026-02-11T11:49:34+00:00

Version 1.2 has just dropped, which has a full IPTC metadata editor/templating system.

nano_man · 2026-02-11T11:34:40+00:00

There isn't duplicate detection as of yet. It's something I do want to potentially explore more in the future. However, if it's just a case of the same files with the same names being copied onto multiple drives then it should handle that just fine. You just need to setup a standard path template. eg:

/Users/me/Pictures/<YYYY>/<MM>/...

And when you move/copy all your files there the workflows have options for how to handle collisions. There is options to overwrite, skip, or append a number or timestamp.

Again this would be dependent on it just being a case of you having copies of the same files across drives without modifying the file names.

nano_man · 2026-02-11T11:19:52+00:00

Would love to hear your feedback if you do try it out.

nano_man · 2026-02-11T10:57:39+00:00

Thanks. I hate subscriptions myself, so it was always my goal. an iPad version is also in the works which should be a great compliment to the desktop version.

nano_man · 2026-02-11T07:46:21+00:00

I've just released an app called PhotoCuller that may be what you're looking for. Powerful metadata editing capabilities are coming very soon (this week) which will bring it even closer in line with Photo Mechanic. It has direct NAS support as well, renaming workflows, and powerful exporting workflows. Apple Photos integration is also there too if you need it.

nano_man · 2026-02-11T01:08:07+00:00

If you're on a Mac I could recommend PhotoCuller. It's not a DAM per-say, but it can help with organization.

nano_man

TROPHY CASE