NeoFinder as photo catalog on macOS

On macOS, I prefer Capture One as my RAW editor, but C1’s cataloging features are weak. Plus, I’d prefer not having my catalog and editor so tightly tied together. I’d love to get out of the Adobe ecosystem, so I don’t want to get too deep into using Lightroom Classic for my catalog. Photo Mechanic is great, but has gotten too expensive.

I thought I’d revisit NeoFinder. I’m glad I did.

NeoFinder is really good at keeping track of all kinds of media on all kinds of storage. I’ve put 2025’s photos and some other projects into it as a test, and it’s impressive. Also, the app just turned 30 years old, so, Lindy Effect.

There are all kinds of handy tools to manage photo metadata. Here’s just one menu:

Oh, and it’s inexpensive ($39.99) with no subscription required.

My current plan is to catalog everything using NeoFinder, then export the edited keepers to my Immich instance for sharing/faces/albums.

I considered using digiKam for this, as it’s nicely cross-platform, but I don’t think it’ll cut it for the whole catalog. There are some nice tools built into digiKam, so it will remain in the toolbox.

The next step is to move everything out of iCloud Photos into Immich. That’s a whole ’nuther project.