Hello! This is both a question and commentary, as I’m hoping to finally solve a dilemma that’s bothered me all year.

I have a library nearing 1 million photos and videos of all formats (including RAW and heic) that I’ve built over several years. Nowadays, I edit with Capture One, which is fantastic, but not very useful for importing (lack of options), culling (slow render), and especially cataloging (breaks down with a year’s worth of photos). I do not yet have a NAS, and store everything on two USB HDDs — broke artist with ancient mac arch etc etc.

So began the quest to find software that could organize and show my photos. What’s the use of a million photos if it takes too long to look at any of them? My POIs were importing (copying files from source to library, sorting by year/month, detecting duplicates), culling (rate, color tag, keywords, and preview speed in full view), and catalog (fast gallery thumbnails, albums, sorting, small data size). Here’s what I’ve found thus far:

-Lightroom: Does it all, but I hate it. Overpriced, lacks some professional features, doesn’t play well with a lot of non-adobe apps, no duplicate finder, slow-ish.

-PhotoMechanic Plus: Excellent cataloging, okay culling and import. Quite expensive, doesn’t let you assign custom keyboard shortcuts, weird-ish licensing system, hard to tell what data you have in your RAW photos (can you save under/overexposed parts? will it look good in B&W?)

-ACDSee 10 for Mac: Eh? Seems to work well, but has some… quirks. Always shows both jpeg and raw when shooting linked. Feels underdeveloped still, or like a paid version of Darktable.

-FastRawViewer: Amazing for culling, shows full RAW data and lets you view with basic “effects” like shadow boost of B&W. Lacks keywords or any kind of cataloguing or importing.

-XnViewMP: Previews seem fast enough, but software seems slow and sometimes has issues when scrolling past videos. Unsure how usable it is for importing.

-Mylio: Offers a lot of features and a nice UI for free, but also seems oversimplified, has a lot of weird restrictions, doesn’t offer a good way to switch to my backup drive if my main fails, and seems to read the wrong capture date on many of my Panasonic RAW photos. I’m also worried it won’t stay free forever.

-PhotoSupreme: Supposedly similar to PhotoMechanic? I could not get it to work very well, seems to lack the import to year/month folder feature so I didn’t spend a ton of time with it.

-DigiKam/DarkTable: (similar experience with both) Worked okay, but both software and previews were slow. It felt like my catalog file was set up wrong and slowing things down, but everything I checked looked correct. I tested these a while ago now, maybe they’ve improved or I should change something?

-PhotoStructure: I’m hopeful? Seems to just be for cataloging and deleting duplicates, but paired with FastRawViewer and C1, I’m okay with that. I’m running this now and will update… so far looks like it’s going to be slow, unfortunately.

-Adobe Bridge and similar DAMs without cataloging: Too slow and complex to navigate for more than like 20 pictures. At least FastRawViewer lets you see subfolder contents, unlike most of these. Great if you do low-batch work, but I shoot a lot (concerts, etc) so it’s a non-starter.

-Network DAMs, ie Daminion: Sounds great. Doesn’t work for me per above…

I’m left baffled. How are there all of these almost-good options at vastly different price points? Like, smash together ACDSee and FastRawViewer and I’d be a happy camper, but no. I know development is hard and I’m not saying any of these are bad software, but, surely there’s something that covers these relatively basic bases?

For myself, I see two path: Drop money I don’t have on PhotoMechanic Plus, or make do with FastRawViewer and C1 with a minimal catalog. I feel like there has to be a better option though. Does anyone have tips? A program I haven’t tried, or settings to make the above work betetr?

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Thank ya!

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P.S. I’ll update the above as I learn more!