4 above - sidecar approaches are impractical for me, and ' darktable will never ever open source files for writing'. Managed libraries don't properly follow changes done in Finder.

Syncing catalogues between machines using rsync is not trivial. It's also badly integrated in the OSX desktop.

It's just heavily using the KDE ecosystem, which makes building the port on a Mac hard. Perhaps someone here can point out what I missed.

user-definable integration of external editing toolsĪpart from KDE's really great DigiKam, which suffers from a not-yet-perfect Mac port, I did not find any software fulfilling those rather simple requirements.

Metadata and changes to the image catalogs must be easily syncable using classic, non-cloud tools like rsync, unison, Bittorrent Sync or SyncThing.

The manager must be able to write geotags, textual tags and timestamp corrections directly into the images (in order to make the metadata available to 3rd party apps - sidecar files like those used by Darktable are useless there).

This folder structure must follow changes made within the software, and any changes made in Finder must be tracked and represented in the photo manager.

Pictures must be stored in a folder structure on disk, not a monolithic catalogue.

Native Mac program (or at least very well ported interface from a different OS).

I don't strictly require built-in editing and raw conversion functions. Working with those documentary pictures will require extensive tagging and search functions. The management software will be used on normal everyday pictures (holidays, landscapes and so on) as well as a large collection of documentary pictures with little artistic value from renovating protected old buildings. But for quite a while now, I have struggled to find Mac software suitable for my requirements. You'd think that there is more than enough photo management software out there.

Photo management for mac