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iPhoto is a great application for storing your photos. But as your library gets bigger and bigger, it can all turn into a bit of a mess and make locating that photo you’re after more of a mission than it should be. Shoebox from KavaSoft is a photo organization app which sorts your pictures by content based on tags and categories.

For those of you who feel like you are growing out of iPhoto, Shoebox might be just the solution. In this review I’ll take a look at how it compares to iPhoto, what it has going for it and what it doesn’t.

Overview

When you first open up Shoebox, it all looks quite different to other photo applications which is a little daunting. Don’t worry – as you get used to it, the change in layout makes sense. Shoebox is great at finding the exact photo you are after within seconds by searching by tags, and it sorts them a little like you might expect the Finder to.

Shoebox also packs a good range of other features that you wont find in iPhoto, such as backing up or storing photos on external media to save space and browsing photos full size directly from a camera without importing.

One notable difference between Shoebox and iPhoto, is that Shoebox doesn’t create it’s own giant file to store the photos in like iPhoto does, but rather links to their current location in the Finder.  This is good and bad, meaning you can keep the images where you want, but if you move them or change their filename Shoebox will lose track of them.

Shoebox uses the term “Categories”, but this essentially means the same thing as “Tags” or “Keywords” that you might be used to seeing in other apps.

Importing Photos

Shoebox makes transfering photos from your previous libraries a breeze. I imagine most people who try it out would already have an iPhoto library in place, and Shoebox offers a one-click import from iPhoto, whilst retaining any keywords and even ratings that you may have already added.

Getting Started with Categories

Of course, for search functionality to work seamlessly, there is a bit of manual labour involved; adding keywords to each and every photo you want to keep an eye on.  Shoebox does everything it can to minimize the effort;  you can quickly select multiple images to tag, and typing the first letter or two of a tag will automatically fill in the rest.

The Categories Window shows all of the various categories you will have created by tagging photos and allows you to arrange them, which is actually a powerful tool. This means that you can place “cats”, “sharks” and “bees” inside the category of “Animals”. This way, if you tag a photo “cat”, and then search for “Animals”, all the photos with cats in them will be displayed in the results.  This is a great feature and means you can give each photo less tags than you would normally need to.

Browsing

There are four ways to browse photos in Shoebox; by folders as they are in the Finder, by categories that you’ve created, by searching, or directly off the camera.

All methods are useful for different scenarios. The Category Browser has a helpful ‘progress-bar’ feature which lets you see at a glance how many photos each category has, relative to the others.

The camera browser is perfect for looking at photos off a camera or memory card without having to import, a feature which iPhoto lacks.

Shoebox also offers the choice of grid, list or slideshow view.

Other Notable Features

Shoebox lets you back photos up to an external HD or disk with ease, and if running short of space, even lets you shrink the backed up photos on your main computer.  This means that you can still see all of your photos, at a lower resolution, but when you connect the backup media Shoebox will automatically show the full resolution version.  You can also instantly restore the shrunk photos back to as they were.

Shoebox can also play slideshows fullscreen while using another monitor to list the pictures, burn photos to a disk, and look up detailed info on each photo such as the exposure settings like f.stop and ISO.

What’s Missing?

There’s a few things that Shoebox doesn’t have.  A big one that iPhoto users will miss is any form of photo editing – you can’t crop or enhance images at all.  Shoebox wasn’t designed to have this, and is intended to complement a photo editing application such as Photoshop or Preview, but I personally find it a timesaver having editing functions within the app that you look at your photos with.

Most still cameras can now also film in video, so it is unfortunate that whilst you can categorize videos, Shoebox doesn’t display thumbnails of many common formats.

Shoebox has also crashed a few times while I’ve been using it which is a nuisance but is almost instant to reopen.

Conclusion

If you’re finding that your photo library is quickly becoming huge, Shoebox could be just the right application for locating the exact photos you’re after.  It lacks a few things iPhoto has like photo editing, but also provides a far superior method of finding photographs; it basically comes down to your needs.

Shoebox can be downloaded in a limited trial form (allowing you to only view up to 25 photos at a time), and can also be purchased in Express for $30 and a Pro version for $80.  Shoebox Express allows for up to 10,000 photos while Pro is unlimited.

Tell us what you’re preferred method for photo organization is.  Do you use iPhoto, Shoebox, or another, perhaps more advanced application like Bridge or Aperture?

As well as sponsoring the site this week, I’m pleased to let you know that Realmac Software has offered to give away five copies of their latest application, Courier, to a handful of lucky readers (aren’t they nice!).

We wrote a little bit about Courier earlier this week, but essentially it’s an easy way to quickly share files, images, photos, movies, and more with all your favourite online services – including Flickr and Facebook.

Entering is really easy. All you need to do is retweet the following message, and leave a comment on this post with your Twitter username!

Just entered a competition to win a Courier license, courtesy of @macappstorm and @realmacsoftware: http://bit.ly/hJt3sA

Click here to tweet the message and enter!

Best of luck! We’ll be picking the winners in exactly one week, on Thursday the 30th December. Thanks for taking part!

So many of us have remarkably messed up iTunes libraries; artists written in the track names or missing altogether, grey music notes for album art, and an absence of album or genre information. I’ve always been pretty meticulous about my iTunes library, but I wish I’d discovered this application earlier – TuneUp is a brilliant extension to iTunes which can automatically look through your library and clean everything up!

If your iTunes library is a bit of a hodgepodge, then TuneUp could be exactly what you need to sort it out.  Read on to see what the app is capable of and find out whether it’s worth purchasing.

Overview

TuneUp is its own application, but latches on to the right edge of iTunes. It boasts a number of great features, separated by tabs at the top of it’s window. Amongst others, TuneUp can “automagically” fix up all song information, add cover art, display a rundown of videos, news, artist bios, and let you know of upcoming concerts. And it does almost work like magic.

Clean

The ‘Clean’ tab of TuneUp works simply by dragging your “dirty” songs from iTunes and dropping them into the TuneUp window. TuneUp then analyses the audio and compares it with a database of over 90 million tracks, as well as looking at the details already in the track to work out exactly what song it is… all within a matter of seconds.

You can then save TuneUp’s fixes, although it pays to check through the track info because it doesn’t always get it perfect. There’s also an Undo button, and a library Analyzer which looks through your entire library for clean and dirty tracks, dishes out some statistics and sorts your songs into three playlists: Cleaned, Dirty, and Not Found.

In the Clean Preferences you can customize exactly what TuneUp changes to your songs, including avoiding tagging tracks to compilations, setting how specific you want your genres to be, and picking which metadata information to save.

Cover Art

The Clean tab actually adds cover art to your dirty tracks, but the Cover Art tab is exclusively for making cover-flow look like it should. Tuneup looks through your library for missing art and does what appears to be a Google image search for the album art. It shows up with it’s best guess but also offers three others for when it gets it wrong – which it does (I was offered a picture of Ronan Keating for a Green Day album).

Because these pictures are simply taken from the internet, the image quality is often poor so I’d be inclined to just use the “Get Album Artwork” button under ‘Advanced’ in the iTunes menu as long as the album is listed in iTunes.

Tuniverse, Concerts & Share

TuneUp is more than just an iTunes fixer. The final three tabs, Tuniverse, Concerts, and Share let you discover more about the music you’re listening to and share it to the world, without ever leaving iTunes.

The Tuniverse tab offers videos straight from YouTube which are playable within TuneUp, a Biography of the band, News, Album Recommendations and even Merchandise from eBay.

Concerts gives you a run down of upcoming concerts in your area and “Share” offers Facebook publishing of posts such as “Songs Most Played”.

Drawbacks

TuneUp is undoubtably a remarkable application, but there are a few things that need work. One of the first things I noticed was that it definitely doesn’t like Spaces. If you drag the iTunes window into a different space, TuneUp will just disappear until you place iTunes back to where it was opened.

I also found the Cover Art feature to often yield disappointing results due to the fact that it simply performs an image search across the internet rather than looking at it’s own server of high quality album art.

One other quirk is that when scrolling around TuneUp with my Magic Mouse, it often does some funny stuff and messes up how it displays the content, but this issue goes away when dragging the scroll bar.

Conclusion

All in all, TuneUp is truly impressive and does a superb job of identifying music tracks and assigning the correct information to them. It makes the odd mistake, and the Cover Art feature doesn’t always come out with quite what your after, but it is so much faster than filling in this information manually. The Tuniverse is also a fun way to discover more about artists.

TuneUp can be downloaded for free with 100 track cleans, 50 cover-arts, and unlimited access to Tuniverse, Concerts and Share.

For $19.95 you get everything for a year, and for $29.95 it’s all unlimited forever. I’d definitely recommend giving TuneUp a go if your iTunes library is a mess and needs cleaning.

Let us know your thoughts on TuneUp in the comments below!

It’s time for another “Ask the Editor” post today. A big thank you to everyone who sent in their questions – it’s great to have the chance to help you out with your Mac-related queries and quibbles.

Some of the topics covered this week include assessing the health of your MacBook battery, monitoring network traffic, pausing background applications, and picking a battery charger.

Read on for plenty of handy Mac knowledge!

Is there a free app for the Mac that can monitor network traffic? Net Monitor is a paid version, but paid versions are all I can find.

– James Crawford

We’ve actually written about this topic previously on the site, and there are a few utilities that are capable of monitoring network traffic and bandwidth. Of course, much depends upon the level and detail you require.

For simple monitoring, you can use the Network tab of Activity Monitor. This is fairly rudimentary, and doesn’t offer any advanced functionality (such as exporting logs or viewing historical data). It might do the trick if your needs are simple.

Alternatively, you could give SurplusMeter a try, which is specifically geared towards monitoring network bandwidth usage over a certain period. Not necessarily the best for in-depth, real-time analysis, but it’s completely free.

Net Monitor, the application you mentioned, comes in at $10. It’s fairly advanced, and isn’t exactly priced out of most people’s budget. Unfortunately, there isn’t an equally capable application available completely free of charge (as far as I’m aware!)

Do you recommend any brand of batteries or charger for the Magic Mouse? What factors affect battery life?

– Natalia Ventre

The first thing to mention in this regard is that it’s definitely not cost-effective in the long-run to buy “one use” batteries for your Magic Mouse or Apple Keyboard. These devices really chew through power at a rapid pace, and you’ll quickly find yourself spending a frighteningly large sum on new batteries.

A rechargeable solution is the way to go, and I’d definitely recommend considering Apple’s Battery Charger. This comes with six batteries, so you can always have two charging, and plenty left for both your Magic Mouse and Keyboard if need be. It’s priced at $29 – a wise investment in the long run!

There are, of course, plenty of other battery charging solutions on the market, ranging from around $12 upwards. Go for the best quality set of batteries and charger that your budget will allow, as they’ll last longer for each use, and have a longer overall lifespan.

Is there a way to restrict your Mac to only run one program at a time? I’m a photographer, and want to dedicate all my processing power to Lightroom.

– Joe

I completely understand your pain, Joe, and am pleased to let you know that this is definitely possible. Although there’s no way to do this on your Mac by default, as ever, an enterprising developer has already created something to fit the bill.

Head over to St. Clair Software and download AppTamer. After installing it, you’ll be able to select a variety of different applications that you do, or do not, want to be “paused” after a certain inactivity period.

For your purposes, a good idea would be to:

1. Open up most of your commonly used apps
2. Check “AutoStop” next to all of them, except Lightroom
3. Turn on App Tamer when you’re doing serious editing/processing, and turn it off again afterwards (otherwise you’ll probably be frustrated by various applications not running when you’d like them to)

I’d recommend AppTamer for many Mac users who suffer from regular slow-downs, but still like to have all their applications running concurrently. Just be sure not to select certain software that regularly needs to run in the background (e.g. your FTP application will need to upload files while you work on something else).

Which steps could I take to determine whether my MacBook battery is damaged?

– Jose Carrillo

This depends largely upon whether you’re taking about physical/mechanical damage, or just the natural decrease in charge over many month and years of recharge cycles.

For the former, it’s definitely best to take your MacBook into an Apple Store for someone to take a look at the hardware. If it’s just a drop in charge that you’re noticing, there are a few ways to investigate this further.

I’d recommend downloading and installing Coconut Battery. This handy (and free) application shows you live information about your battery, such as how often it was charged, and how the current maximum capacity relates to the original capacity your battery had when it left the factory.

This will give you a good indication of what state your battery is in, and the type of improvement you would notice if you decide to purchase a new one. We’ll actually have an entire post dedicated to battery calibration coming on Sunday, so stay tuned for more information then!

What project management apps allow me to track projects, clients, time, and complex tasks?

– Eduard M

Sounds like you need an application that can handle an awful lot of different things! For most of what you’ve mentioned, I’d recommend giving Billings a try. It’s priced at around $45, but comes with a very powerful feature set. You can check out our review for a full overview.

For tracking complex tasks, Billings might not be the best solution. I’d actually recommend taking a look at a web application – Basecamp – that goes a few steps further than most simple “to do” list apps for the Mac. It also works well with multiple people, if the project is a collaboration.

Didn’t See Your Question?

If you asked a question but didn’t have it answered today, don’t worry! I’ll do my best to get to it in a future week. I love a challenge, so feel free to ask some weird and wonderful questions…

If you’d like to submit your query, you can do so here:Online Form – AppStorm > Ask The Editor

Thanks for reading, and let me know if you agree or disagree with anything I mentioned today!