Need photo viewing software for Mac

I'm looking for good photo viewing software for Mac (up to $50) to replace iPhoto. Why? Because my computer is a PC and my wife's is a Mac. When I upload photos from my camera, I want her to see them automatically without me having to copy them over or import them.

My current plan: upload them to the shared NAS drive where we also keep music, and point her photo software there. But iPhoto 5 doesn't seem to be able to browse folders of photos (it wants me to import them when new ones are added--that's what I don't want to bother doing) and Finder isn't very good at just browsing folders full of photos, either. (She has OS X Tiger).

I'd consider upgrading to the latest iPhoto except several of the apps require an Intel Mac and some of them require more RAM than she has (she has 512MB). I'm not interested in spending that much to upgrade her system just so she can more conveniently view photos.

Any suggestions, either for software I should try or for an alternative way to do what I want, for $50 or less?

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asked on Jan 18, 2009

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comments and reviews

I found something good: Xee. It's pretty fast, even on a 512MB PowerPC Mac. It doesn't have a thumbnail view but I also figured out that I was wrong when I thought OS X Tiger can't browse a folder of photos. I just had to find the right setting to show JPG icons as mini-previews. Then I set Xee as the default viewer for JPG files (instead of Preview).

And Xee is free. Even better! If I keep using it and continue to like it, maybe I'll make a donation to the author.

I also decided not to just keep the photos on our NAS drive since it's a bit slower to access them there than the local drive. So I use the SyncToy PowerToy on XP to synchronize daily from my Camera folder to my NAS drive, and I use SilverKeeper on the Mac to synchronize daily (slightly later in the day) from the NAS drive to the Mac.

This setup seems like it will work nicely for me!

#1 - posted on Jan 19, 2009 (10:10 am)

I think Google's photo browsing software Picasa is now available for the Mac. Perhpas that will let you browse folders from both computers?

#2 - posted on Jan 19, 2009 (12:20 pm)

Thanks for the suggestion, Mike. But I tried Picasa yesterday and discovered it only works on Intel Macs. I forgot to mention in my original post that my wife's Mac is a PowerPC.

#3 (reply to #2) - posted on Jan 19, 2009 (12:57 pm)

Actually you don't need to install anything on the Mac, at least if you are running OSX 10.5.

You can use the Finder and the Preview application.

#4 (reply to #1) - posted on Feb 1, 2009 (10:58 am)

Hey Russ,

Thanks for the tip.

It was OSX 10.4, not 10.5, and on 10.4 the Preview application isn't as good and seemed pretty slow, so I wasn't happy with that solution. And I didn't know how to display mini-previews of photos in the Finder but after posting this question I learned how to turn previews on. In 10.5 it's turned on by default.

Since I was hoping to spend less than $50, upgrading to 10.5 wasn't my first choice.

But now my wife's Mac died (hard disk failure--second one in 3 years) so I decided it was time to get her a new computer. She now has a beautiful 20" iMac with OSX 10.5. (It cost just a little more than $50 ha ha.) And you're right--the Finder and Preview seems like a pretty good solution in 10.5 for browsing photos.

So I'll let her see Preview and Xee and she can pick whichever one she likes more since they're both free.

#5 (reply to #4) - posted on Feb 1, 2009 (9:43 pm)