As an aspiring photographer, I take a lot of pictures. When I'm done shooting I need a place to import and organize my photos. Like most Mac users, I used iPhoto and later Photos because they were included with the system. But iPhoto and Photos have been nothing but a pain in the ass for me.
iPhoto started to suck right around the time I started shooting in RAW. The import process was unbearably slow. It was a throwback to the dial up days when you'd go make some coffee while waiting for the page to load. iPhoto often took 10 minutes or more to import less than 100 pictures. During the import process, iPhoto would peg all my CPU cores to 100% making my Macbook Pro lag like a bargain bin Android tablet.
Photos was only a slight improvement in that regard. The import process was much quicker. However, the entire time Photos was open my CPU usage was always around 100% on one or two cores. This essentially makes Photos useless on a laptop without having a charger nearby. That kind of power consumption is just not acceptable for a photo viewing app.
Unbound for Mac seems like the best alternative. I don't need the editing features that iPhoto or Photos have. I just need a simple viewer and organizer that works. Better yet, Unbound doesn't store the photo files inside of some blackbox folder structure. It just leaves them the way they were on your machine. Unbound is fast and simple and it just works.
