How Should I Store & View ?

[Bluebird 65]

I currently have photos on different USBs, hard drives, CDs and my Mac. I would like have them in one place and not in public view, to be able to view as named albums without it using any additional memory on my Mac. can anyone suggest what I should consider please.

 

[lindsay]

Put them all into iCloud. You could then use Photos to organise them into albums as you wish

 

[AndrewFlannigan]

If you don't want to use the cloud, you can always store them in the Mac's file system. I use the following procedure...

1. I use an external disk called "Primary" for all my non-operating system storage,
2. All my data is stored in a seperate folder on my hard disk called, oddly enough, "Data"
3. Under "Data", I have a folder called "Pictures"
4. Under that, I have a folder for each year (1967, 1968, etc.)
5. Inside each year I have a folder to hold large groups of pictures ("Dawlish Air Show", "Devon County Show", etc.)
6. All pictures are given a descriptive title ("Hawker Hurricane at Dawlish Show 2019 D1014532", etc) where the number at the end is that assigned by the camera.
7. Images copied and altered for a particular purpose are stored in a seperate folder under "Data" with an appropriate name, such as "Pictures for Forums".

As you can probably see, this gives me various ways to find a picture or several pictures which were taken at different times and in different places but share, for example, the subject "Jet".

This is simple and relatively foolproof. I back the data up daily onto two other external drives called "Secondary" and "Tertiary" and take snapshots on a regular basis onto other drives.

 

[garryknight]

Sounds like you want a photo viewer program to which you can add different drives and folders as a catalog, then click on a particular source to view the photos there. I imagine that being able to sort them by categories and/or labels would also be useful. This kind of software is known as Digital Asset Management.

I use On1 Photo Raw but it's expensive as it's also a full-featured photo processing suite. I suggest you search for "digital asset management" and "photo viewer Mac".