An Interesting Feature for Photographers in MacOS Mojave
There wasn't much announced in yesterday’s WWDC keynote targeted at photographers, apart from some new search suggestions and ways to share in Photos. There was, however, a couple of features in the MacOS finder that could actually prove quite useful. Those are the new gallery and EXIF information views in the finder.
While I get that Windows has had a similar feature for ages, for Mac users, I think this will be particularly useful. In a way, it’s one less reason to have to use something like Adobe Bridge. Coupled with the new exif view, and contextual actions, you could do a lot of essential asset management features with the Finder now without having to open a separate piece of software. Of course, it’s not going to be usable for anything complicated. You probably can’t actually edit metadata with it, but then again, the actions seem to be extensible so it may be possible for third parties to give it that functionality.
I'm not suggesting for a second that this could take on a dedicated database based application such as Lightroom or Capture One. But there are times when you need to manage and find image files (and other visual files) on a file system that aren’t in a database, and something like this could go a long way to making that task a little easier, at least visually.
The reason this resonated with me is that I recently had to do this for a project. I had thousands of files stored on an external hard drive. I was trying to find some specific images, visually, and I had resorted to using Adobe Bridge. It was not a pleasant experience, and Bridge couldn’t find files that I knew were in a specific location. This new gallery view, coupled with a few smart searches would have worked perfectly. Anyway, it’s just a thought. It’s still a few months away from the final release so we will see in time.
Oh, and the dark mode and continuity camera features. They’re pretty cool too!
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