A Handy Friend: iPhoto Buddy

If your iPhoto library is brimming with hundreds or thousands of pictures, you’re no doubt trying to figure out how to manage your photos beyond the organizing features that come installed with iPhoto. 

Sure, Apple constantly reminds us that iPhoto 5 and 6 can hold 25,000 photos, but I can’t imagine anyone wanting to shift through that many photos in one library. I mean who really wants to spend that much time looking for the only pictures of your mother-in-law that you took last time you visited her three years ago? Or think about what it means to mix your family photos with your your business photos. It doesn’t make sense.

For years I’ve been using a photo library management application that enabled me to have separate iPhoto libraries. I won’t give the name of that application because I’ve discovered a better one, called iPhoto Buddy. The one I’ve been using was fine, but iPhoto Buddy comes with additional features that outshine the rest. Plus, it’s a donation shareware application that is free and fully featured. But it’s worth any price you can pay. 

Opening the application and perusing the 39 pages of documentation (not that you need to read it all of it to run the program) , you can tell the application’s author put in a lot of thinking and work into building this management system. 

The above screen capture illustrates about all you need to know about iPhoto Buddy. With it, you can easily create and delete iPhoto libraries on the fly. The application never deletes any of your original photos, it just acts as a pointer to where the folders and files are stored. If you want, you can always go back to the default way of managing your photos in one library, but after using iPhoto Buddy, you won’t want to return to the old method.

What I like most about this the latest version of iPhoto Buddy is how you can add thumbnails to quickly identify each library. I have to admit, that sense I’ve started using computers, I’ve become a visual oriented person. So I’m much more drawn to applications that use icons and thumbnails to help me navigate. Visual orientations are faster and more aestically pleasing to the eye than a bunch of words.

The application comes with over fifteen different preferences so that you can make iPhoto Buddy fit your work flow. When for example, when you open an iPhoto library, you can have iPhoto Buddy remain on the deskstop, minimize to the dock, or quit all together. 

You can also use iPhoto Buddy to open up iMovie and iDVD which as you know are both intergrated with iPhoto. 

The design and ease of use of this application is a must have for any heavy iPhoto user.