One of the mixed blessings about digital photography is that without dealing with the costs of film and development, it’s really almost too easy to collect a huge amount of photos. If you’ve been in the digital photography game for more than a couple of years, chances are that unless you’re meticulously organized, you’ve got folders full of photos that have just been transferred onto your computer and left for later because it just takes too much time to sort and organize everything. MacPhun’s Snapselect ($15) is a new app designed to help you clean up that mess, and take much of the headache out of getting your photos into some semblance of order.
Supporting Aperture, iPhoto, Lightroom, or simply a folder full of photos, Snapselect uses smart image recognition technology to scan through your library, finding not only exact duplicates, but similar photos to help you pick your best images and set aside the ones you may not really need to keep around. When you first fire up the app, it scans though your photo collection, even across multiple libraries or folders, and groups all of your photos together, organized by the time they were taken. You can then scroll through at your convenience, visually compare photos, and pick out the great ones, which can be exported to a folder, photo library software, or editing app, or even shared on social media.
In addition to the “Similars” view, the app also provides a handy “Timeline” mode that shows your photos organized not only by date, but within time-of-day groupings within each date, making it easier to zone in on a particular event or occasion. Once you’ve got your library cleaned up, Snapselect can help you keep it that way, by letting you easily scan through imported photos from memory cards or other sources to get the best pictures out quickly, or to go back through your old family photos to find just the right one for an event or photo album.
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