There are lots of ways to gather and organize files and information on the Mac. For photos and images, however, there’s not a great option. Dropbox is great for files, but Finder is Dropbox’s UI, which isn’t always the best option. Evernote is well-liked, but can be overkill for some.
Now there’s Ember.
Ember is a digital scrapbook. Like a real scrapbook, it’s easy to add photos and images, but because it’s digital, the data can be organized easily and quickly. There are tags and collections, as well as metadata and smart folders. There are some great built-in editing and annotation tools, as well.
Here’s a collection I threw together pretty quickly:
Ember isn’t a lazy app. In addition to being able to create screenshots — and automatically import them — it comes with plug-ins for the major browsers and a menu bar utility, making it easy to snap something for collection and move on with your work. You can even give Ember RSS feeds for it to automatically crawl. Ember shows just the images found in the feeds, and offers a single-click interface to add those images to your local library.
Currently, Ember doesn’t sync with anything, and there’s no mobile counterpart for the Mac app. Ellis Hamburger at The Verge mentions these features are coming in the future, however.
Ember is on the Mac App Store for $49 and is built by the fine-looking people over at Realmac Software. If you want a clean, easy way to capture and sort screenshots and images on a Mac, it’s worth the pricetag.