This section is devoted to software capable of creating a logical, searchable photo collection. This is something I found I had a real need for once I started researching image galleries, as I soon had hundreds of photos sloshing around on my PC. Most organisers have some form of tagging, so photos can be grouped into categories ("People", "Places", "Friends" etc), and often they include some basic photo manipulation tools such as cropping and red-eye removal. Other common features are emailing, sharing, and printing facilities. Usually organisers default to displaying images in date-taken order, from which selections can then be displayed by searching or the use of filters.
This feature-packed product also appears in the galleries section. As a photo organiser it works well, being orientated around the folder structure on the PC. There are good search facilities, and you can create your own categories, and also delete the defaults supplied (ideal if you hate “pets”, or have no “friends”). It also contains a photo editor with some quite sophisticated facilities. The products style might be slightly dated, with a quite “noisy” interface, but the features are very accessible and obviously positioned in the light of long experience (the product is currently on version 5). An inexpensive package that offers a lot of functionality.
A very impressive product, and extremely good value for money considering its extensive features. It has a very intuitive interface, and it is extremely quick and easy to get started. I had imported over 200 photos into it within 15 minutes of installation, and within 30 minutes I’d roughly catalogued (“tagged”) all of them. It can also organise off-line content, such as images on CDs, as well as video and audio files. Finding photos either visually from thumbnails or by a search (by date as well as by subject) is extremely fast. As well as being a good organiser, it has a basic photo editor, it can produce photo calendars, photo cards, books, slide shows, simple HTML galleries, and extraordinary 3D galleries. A highly recommended piece of software. The full version is now incorporated into Photoshop Elements, and is not available seperately, however...
The Starter Edition has most of the functionality of the full Album product (it misses out on things like the calendar view and CD burning) but it is free, with no time limit. A real bargin if you can do without the missing features.
This program helps to organise and catalogue images in a user-defined hierarchical structure. It has a search feature to help find images. IdImager allows publishing images to the Internet using 25+ customisable templates. An FTP client is built-in to send the pages to a Web server. The integrated photo editor offers basic editing features and auto-fixing options. Slide shows can be built with a large number of transition effects and recording options. It also includes e-mail, RAW image conversion, ICM Colour Management, red-eye correction, print functionality, image conversion, and a number of possible batch processing options. Shareware, $39 after a 21 day trial.
This is a large, well-featured piece of software - The download is over 32 Mb, so not to be tackled lightly by those without a broadband connection. Installation is straightforward, however, the initial database set-up and data load are more hands-on than in most of these packages. This is due more to the wide range of options available, rather than product immaturity, and once IMatch has been configured and loaded it is extremely quick. The interface is not that intuitive and the “coach” messages rapidly become irritating, but they can be turned off, and perseverance is rewarded with some interesting features and blazing performance. The search features in particular are worthy of note - “visually duplicate”, “binary identical”, “visually similar”, and the unusual “images matching my sketch” among others. Backup is not forgotten - there is a menu option to backup the IMatch database. Classification and keywording are well supported, including the professional IPTC coding system. You do get a lot for your money from this mid-priced package, and if you are looking for something that can manage a lot of images and sophisticated clasifications with high performance this product is well worth a look.
This is a simple cataloguing tool for pictures and a variety of video formats that works well, and is also quick to use in practice. It has all the usual searching facilities, and you can call the photo editor of your choice for image manipulation. It can also create a Screen saver to display images from albums when your PC is unattended. An unpretentious product that does the job. It does have one (as far as I know) unique feature - It can print images in small chunks (ie A4) to make giant posters. Freeware.
This is a rather nice free photo organiser. Very quick to install and set-up, and very intuitive in use. After installation it simply scans your computer for images, and then presents them in thumbnail format, grouped in “albums”, that it derives from directories. This initial scan on my system went through some 60 gigabytes of data and found over 3000 images in only a few minutes. It is configurable for image types (so, for example, you can ignore video files), and you can select whether or not to include or ignore images on a directory basis. Included is a very simple picture editor (“red-eye”, “crop”, “enhance”). There is also a simple picture export to web page facility, which produces a quite effective result, but with a limited range of styles. I liked the slider control to zoom in and out on the thumbnails display, and its ability to print “contact sheets”. Picasa was acquired by Google in July 2004, and can be downloaded for free. There is also an add-on for Picasa, Hello, a kind of instant messaging for pictures.
This organiser is part of Google Pack, a collection of free utilities from Google.
An interesting piece of software that stores images in one central repository, the Microsoft SQL Server Desktop Engine. Unfortunately on what I hoped was a realistic trial of the product also meant treacle slow - I don’t think it unreasonable to ask an organiser to look after 500+ images coming in at just over a gigabyte. Having said that, there are some nice features - graphical marks such as arrows can be added (to point out people in group photos for example). There are also options to backup and restore collections of images, slideshows can be produced relatively easily, and there is a very basic image editor. Thirty-day free trial, and then $35.
“The search is over... Finally, a complete digital photo album that TALKS!”. Indeed it does. There are three versions, including a limited function free package. They are sizeable downloads, with the deluxe model coming in at over 14 MB. PhotoTalk organises images via a rather dated icon driven interface that takes a bit of getting used to, but to be fair it is reasonably competent in this area, and has a nice big viewing window for the selected image as well as a giant text window. Apparently it can also create HTML galleries, however I could not find the icon to do this. If you need a talking album to (possibly) amaze your friends then this is the one for you, otherwise I would not bother. Whilst the software can still be downloaded, the home page of this site seems to have disappeared, so support is probably dubious to non-existant.
A slightly niche product, aimed at owners of cameras that can produce RAW images. These are the basic, unadulterated, and usually quite large files straight from the camera sensor that have not been processed in any way. It is designed to minimise the effort involved from sorting images straight from the camera through processing them, either singly or as a batch, to output as JPEG or TIFF files. It is a slick product that has very good image adjustment features, and I’d recommend users of digital SLRs and better digital compacts to give this a try alongside the software that came with their camera.
An interesting (and free) organiser. It can keep track of images, including video, and it will also catalogue music collections. VAMP has many other features, such as the ability to create photo slideshows, screensavers, greeting cards (with music), and VAMP also offer a photo-sharing facility via their website. As an image organiser it seems to work well, it certainly has a number of interesting features, although it is not as fast (or as visually satisfying) as Adobe Album.
Other photo organisers
- CompuPic - Fast visual browser with all the usual features. Also Pro and Express.
- Digital Photo Librarian - A fairly standard offering. $40.
- Dorothea - Photo indexing system mixed in with a web gallery.
- Extensis Portfolio - Professional quality visual database.
- FotoStation - Not the cheapest, but plenty of features. Mac and Windows.
- FxFoto - Triscapes organiser and photo fixer. Three versions from free upwards.
- Fresh View - Free organiser for staggering range of multimedia file types.
- iPhoto - Apple’s Mac-only free-download offering.
- iView - Interesting media cataloguer for Mac and Windows.
- LEADViEW - Image editing software with photo album functionality.
- Lightroom - Adobe/Macromedia's new product designed primarily for professional photographers to import, select, develop and showcase large volumes of digital images. Currently (Feb 2006) still in beta and Mac only, however a Windows version is under development.
- MagicMedia - An image file explorer, which very usefully can produce thumbnails from numerous image file formats, including video. Very handy for those with a lot of mixed media files. It also has some basic editing functionality for photos and video.
- Paint Shop Photo Album - A very competent product from Jasc.
- PicaJet - Fast and attractive photo organiser in a similar vein to Picasa.
- PhotoArch - Slightly rough set of PHP scripts to front-end a photo database.
- Photo Dub Album - Another creator of talking photo albums..
- Photo Organizer - Photo Organizer is multi-user photo management tool that was designed for professional photographers. It offers a searchable photo database that supports photo version control, client management, photo submission history, EXIF, IPTC, XML, and XMP, user quotas, a datebook, and printing labels and colour brochures in PDF and PS formats. It uses PostgreSQL, features a Web interface, and uses ImageMagick and DCRAW to handle over a hundred image formats including several RAW formats. A grown-up system, but free via the GNU General Public Licence (GPL).
- Preclick - Good free download, with better version for $20.
- StudioLine Photo - Good basic organiser, with cut-down free version
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