What do you guys use to manage photos?

[wrems]

I didn’t want to hijack Brent’s photo thread... so I’ll ask it here.

What software if any (free/paid) are you guys using to manage your photos? I don’t really need a bunch of editing tools since I like and use Photoshop sparingly, I understand most of them come with these tools already.

I’m having a tough time figuring out the best way to manage my photos that is easy and organized. Right now I haphazardly create folders and drop photos in them. It is very disorganized and tough to find anything.

Any tips, any personal opinions of what you use are greatly appreciated.

[freedml]

I use Picasa. It's free and does a nice job of displaying and editing pictures and videos, creating albums, uploading to the web, email, etc.. It doesn't organize them for you, though.

I have yyyy 'year' folders in 'My Pictures'. Under each year, I created a folder yyyy-mm-dd and then keywords for each upload.

[Brent]

I used to use PhotoShop Elements, but have moved on to Picasa. It's free, easy to use, lets me upload to Flickr or Picasa Online. Only thing it doesn't do is real photo editing.

For organizing I save all photos in a Media/Photos folder on my hard drive. Then I have a subdirectory that puts a new folder for each time I drop photos onto my drive (from camera or card or download etc) so it looks like this:
C:/Media/Photos/20090624
C:/Media/Photos/20090701
C:/Media/Photos/20090702

and so on. I also tag my photos with a very basic tag system with peoples names, location when relevant & sometimes additional tags.

[PLUCKYHD]

Originally Posted by wrems

I didn’t want to hijack Brent’s photo thread... so I’ll ask it here.

What software if any (free/paid) are you guys using to manage your photos? I don’t really need a bunch of editing tools since I like and use Photoshop sparingly, I understand most of them come with these tools already.

I’m having a tough time figuring out the best way to manage my photos that is easy and organized. Right now I haphazardly create folders and drop photos in them. It is very disorganized and tough to find anything.

Any tips, any personal opinions of what you use are greatly appreciated.

I started using windows Live photo gallery my self makes labeling them with tags by day,month or whatever easy for the wife.

[matt91]

We use Picasa as well. I do almost no editing, other than rotate portrait shots into landscape. Picasa does this for me, so it meets my needs.

in terms of folders, my wife and I decided long ago that we didn't want to have a cumbersome system of filing photos, since we both knew we never use it. We simply created folders in YYYY-MM format, and store all photos in there. Easy to do, and the only thought process is remembering which month you're currently in when you download the photos!!

Matt

[gplasky]

Another vote for Picasa. I have to clean up the photos my wife takes.

I let picasa create the YYYY-MM-DD format in the My Pictures directory locally. Then I usually copy what I want out to the WHS Pictures share for Sage.

We also use the Picasa website for posting the photos. Picasa has intelligence built in so that it can actually recognize faces in the photos and can tag them on the website for you. So you can actually search by a person's face. pretty cool and works good based on the quality of the photo. It was even able to tag me correctly with and without a mustache.

Gerry

[wrems]

I just watched the picassa vid on youtube it sounds pretty nice. I'll have to give it a go...

So does picassa physically manage photos and place them into respective folders as well as give cataloging features, or does it just keep a database and its up to me to manage the physical schema?

[david1234]

I switched to Adobe Lightroom- it's awesome! It handles the files and makes makes a backup copy to a share on another computer right away during the import.

It does need 2GB (I only have 512 currently, since my workstation died) though to run well though.

[SWKerr]

I have tried a number of different tools and keep going back to Ulead photo Explorer. It has some light editing tools and is perfect for cleaning up and organizing photos in my library. If I need real photo editing I use Paintshop Pro. I like this tool because it keeps everything in normal folder structure. You can rename in mass and edit the photo metadata with leaving the program.

I just reorganized everything by year. For a long time I tried to classify everything by subject but I finally decided to do it by year and them by Subject. Stuff like Holidays, Trips, Family, Friends. Then by more detailed directories under the master ones. There are some subjects that I don't group by year, stuff like Art, Landscapes etc. I also have one called great shot that I copy all the really go stuff to. I use the great shots for slide shows, screen savers and backgrounds.

I take a lot of pictures and most of them stink. It is a digital camera and they are free and more is better. Especially if you have a mother-in-law that never stops moving her lips. I move everything from the camera\SD card with Windows Explorer into a directory called "to be sorted". Every once in a while I then go through them and decide which are worth keeping. After that I will crop, clean up, rename and finally move them into the main library by subject. There is no way to do this automatically with out keeping everything. If you keep everything you will have a lot of crap in your collections and you will not really enjoy going through them. Don't be afraid to delete something that stinks or you have several similar views of. No one want to see 10 pictures of your kid blowing out Birthday candles. (I will make a copy of the "to be sorted" directory before I start editing in case I mess something up.)

I store my video files in the same structure but in a subdirectory called video. I hardly ever take video now but when I do it is from the camera in HD 1280x720 format. I will make a short movie with short video clips and pictures from the occasions. I put music to the whole thing in most cases. These seem much more popular than an edited home video. I then leave the edited slideshow\video\mp4 in the same file structure.

[mayamaniac]

Picasa does a nice job for most of your photo organizing needs. If you have thousands of photos and want to use Picasa on multiple computers, import the picture folders from UNC path (eg: //server/pictures). Then let the fastest computer generate the thumbnails. Once done, you can copy the google database to other computers. For XP, it is stored in C:/Documents and settings/USER/local settings/application data/google. This way you don't have to regenerate the thumbnails for each computer. You can't specify the location of the database though, that's been one of the complaints of Picasa.

[Crashless]

I use Lightroom to process and Elements to organize.

Lightroom has a phenomenal interface for editing and organization - but it's WAF is non-existent.

Elements has a wonderful organizational interface that my wife loves. It doesn't have the facial recognition that Picasa has, but it will locate faces in a photograph, making it easier to tag each image. The biggest plus in my opinion, is that all the data stays on your computer, and not in a webapp.

[cncb]

I use J. River Media Center to organize and tag photos. It also handles music and videos very well. Unlike Elements and Picasa it stores the keyword tags inside the files themselves so you can import the photos into another program and will not have to repeat your work. Windows Live Photo Gallery is pretty good too but unlike JRMC it doesn't support saved collections/playlists or "smartlists" (dynamic playlists).

[briands]

+1 for Picasa...

As already pointed out, it does not play well with multiple use accounts. I use a UNC folder on my server to store pictures, but album details are kept in a user specific folder...seems like it would be a pretty easy thing to fix, but if you search for Picasa and network, you'll see it has been complained about for years and we are no closer to a solution.

The web album even has auto face tagging.... why not on the PC client? This feature works only so well, but it tries to identify the faces, then you can go in and confirm them in groups. There is no way that I am aware to bring these tags back to the client.

[david1234]

Originally Posted by Crashless

I use Lightroom to process and Elements to organize.

Lightroom has a phenomenal interface for editing and organization - but it's WAF is non-existent.

Elements has a wonderful organizational interface that my wife loves. It doesn't have the facial recognition that Picasa has, but it will locate faces in a photograph, making it easier to tag each image. The biggest plus in my opinion, is that all the data stays on your computer, and not in a webapp.

Yeah- my wife hates Lightroom- too many options, and it won't download video from her camera. I just chalk it up to running on a very under-memoried system.

I've got my old sage server waiting to be turned into my new workstation- I'm going to give Lightroom 8GB and load windows 7 as soon as I get the tuners and recordings out of it.

[Folkboat]

Picasa....

It works on XP and Vista................best of all it FREE!

If you want to create a DVD slide show using Picasa (saves show in WMV) TRY "DVD Flick" makes the final slideshow DVD compliant.

PS: DVD Flick is free also!!

[malbec]

Have a Canon digital camera ... Canon Zoom Browser EX to store, browse, etc. Microsoft PhotoDraw to edit, etc.

[Fuzzy]

I use Windows Live Photo Gallery. Really is a great app for organizing your photos...

[valnar]

File system folder structure. Manually by hand - YYYY-MM, etc. It'll survive the test of time decades from now. I've been using computers long enough to know that any proprietary program will eventually burn you.

[bastafidli]

I am with valnar. I use folder structure YYYY organized using OS file manager. This survived 3-4 switches of various operating systems. I am currently running Ubuntu on my client and using Gnome Nautilus to organize the files. I use Metamorphose to rename files and folders. I use gThumb to process batches of photos and use Gimp to edit individual photograhs.

[davephan]

I also use Picasa. It works great for basic photo organization and photo rotation. My only complaint is that is consumes several gigs on my C drive, which makes my C drive disk images larger. However, since the data is stored on the C drive it does give me another backup/recovery method for my photos. I also use Microsoft's free synctoy to automatically backup the photos to other drives.

Dave