Deep vs Aperture vs LightRoom vs iPhoto

One of the major issues we have always had with Aperture, LightRoom and iPhoto is they all require creating catalog type structures. We always found this very limiting. Our view was that the software should read the photos from the folders that are already created on the disk. Because of this, we never migrated to any of these solutions for photos because it did not fit with our approach. Unfortunately, this lead to simply using Preview as our photo viewer, which is not an optimal solution.

Enter Deep

Deep is released by Ironic Software…

http://www.ironicsoftware.com/deep/index.html

…and things really changed. Deep works off the Spotlight index and has a highly flexible way of representing and organizing the photos based upon things like color, tags, location, image type, size and shape. It also offers a keyword finder as well.

Simply put, Deep is a totally new way of managing photos and is waht we think is a killer app. What else is great is while Aperture and LightRoom have heavy UIs, Deep is light as a feather and really looks like a browser. We are really just getting started understanding what we can do with Deep. We are pretty excited about what Deep has to offer. We think its file locator is a new best practice in file manager design.

Deep – Amazing Phoro Finding Software

Deep is made by the same people who make Yep, which is a highly useful document manager for PDF files.

Deep, is their newest product. It is radically different in how it finds photos than anything we have seen before. This is probably the most amazing photo manager we have come across. Four our needs, it is superior to iPhoto, Adobe Lightroom and Aperture. This is a feature of how quickly technology can change, new software can come out and really supplant what came before it.

Deep works off of the Spotlight index, which has to be built. The index will automatically be built once you begin using Deep for looking into external drives. As you can see the index is searching 3 external disks.

However, even after the index, we still were not able to show several directories that had a lot of photos in them. Therefore, we decided to take advantage of the option provided by Deep to reindex the drives. This is where the options are.

The interface is actually a web browser, which really reinforces our view that future interfaces will really just be web page type front ends. Here you can see how there are many options that allow you to search through drives and folders. The viewing area below has thumbnails of those images that match the criteria above. There is a huge amount of functionality to explore in Deep, and we will do so in future posts.

National Geographic for Images

We found great photos out at national geographic online. They also have some great videos. 

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/video/player#/?titleID=3635234001&catID=1

Life Photo Database at Google

This is interesting. Google now has part of Life magazine’s photo archive on the web. We spent a little time perusing the images. We found it to be an excellent site for classic photos.

http://images.google.com/hosted/life

You can also access this site directly from the Google Image search by typing the syntax *topic* source: life, which looks like this.

It is a great source for photos on famous individuals.

Secondly, it comes with what is really a best practice…a date other metadata about the photo.

The photos are of very high quality. As you can see, we were able to select this image (just a crop) and you can see the resolution.