Photo organization/management software?
4Any recommendations for photo organizing/managing software? After a week in Kruger Park I’m overwhelmed with photos and videos, nevermind a lifetime of other photos!
There’s a staggering number of options out there. I don’t mind paying for good software, but subscriptions are right out.
I used Google’s Picasa until they killed it. And I’ve recently looked at ACDSee and Adobe Bridge. I’m not thrilled that both required creating an account and logging in just to install the software. Is this DRM?
Phototheca? IMatch?
Oh yeah, Windows OS.
Thanks.
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I’ve been looking at Forever.com Historian software and storage for a while. It really depends on what you’re wanting to do with your photos. For me, organization, timelines and family inheriting and having access to my photos while I am around and after I’m gone are my interests. Yours may be entirely different.
P.S. discount for new customers.
Also, the Picasa standalone program still works, just only locally. The face recognition for tagging is pretty amazing, but then again, it is uploading your photos to do it, and computers, especially ones run by Google and Facebook never forget anything, ever.
I’ve been looking for a similar thing.
I have a couple of large boxes of slides that were my dad’s, and I have a slide scanner. One issue is that he wrote on most of the slides (what the picture is of, date, etc.), and I want to capture that along with the image as I scan them.
Ideally I’d also like to make these available online to other family members who have never seen many of these pictures.
I am on Mac OS though.
@zachdecker I had a similar situation with some slides and old photos, both mine and a friend’s. I have an Epson flatbed scanner with a slide scanner insert, so I would do the slide scan, then a regular cropped bed scan that would show the frame of the slide so it got the stuff written on it. For photos we cut some jigs from matte board to hold the photos so we could flip them to get the writing on the back and get aligned scans of the same size.
Organization was all manual, referencing the linked slides by file name. We were then able to build catalogs with an index page so you could call up the images and any associated text for display, and have that online or on a CD (remember CDs?). It was all done in Acrobat and was incredibly tedious, so I’m watching this thread for any leads on organization software.
I haven’t found anything I liked as much as Picasa; it was a shame Google axed it. OTOH I haven’t looked that hard as it’s not been that important a problem for me to solve yet.
Besides Picasa standalone (although I read it doesn’t install on Win10), I found good things said about Phototheca.
I think it’s $40 for the paid version.
There might be a free trial/limited version.
https://lunarship.com/
@mike808 Picasa 3.3 (?) standalone works fine on Win 10.
Here’s some free items I use a lot:
http://acpress.com/6free.htm
I might be wrong, but I believe you can still buy standalone versions of Lightroom.
PhotoShop Elements also has organizational tools.
Moving on:
I’ve heard great things about “On1 Photo Raw” for its cataloging. Also “Photo Mechanic” for culling images and browsing folders etc.
But really; I’m kinda ashamed to admit this, but… nah, I’m not: Google Photos lets you upload an unlimited amount of photos and videos for free if you’re ok with them using (a very very impressive) compression on your (16MP or less) photos. Greater than 16MP gets reduced to 16 and then compressed. If you pay for cloud storage you can upload full size. Breaking News: If you upload pics from a late model iPhone those actually get stored in their original uncompressed state (yet Pixel 4 users have to compress or pay!).
So hear me out, I used to moonlight as a photographer and still approach it as an art on occasion and like keeping my RAW files and tagging my best work, etc. For all of that, I have my Adobe sub and use Lightroom. However, for general snapshots, vacations, get-togethers etc LR is just too much hassle. I auto-upload all of that in Google Photos and through the magic of 1984 meets HAL plus Johnny 5 we get some jaw-dropping search accuracy without tagging a single thing. If I do a one-time training session I can search by anyone’s name even at different ages, in addition I can search for circuit boards, engine bays, cakes, squirrels, and so on… and it ALL shows up automagically. If needed, I can then read the details of a particular shot and go to my full-size RAW file that I also back up elsewhere without worrying about tagging. [I know, I know: all this for the low low price of my {mundane} privacy!]
Recently I created a shared folder for four of us in my household and told google to include pics of all of us plus certain other family and friends. Whenever any of us four uploads new pics to that folder we all get notified and can comment. I then have that folder used as the source for the slideshow on our smart display (it’s the Lenovo one) in the kitchen and on my phone whenever it’s charging. Mind you, I have a good ten years of stuff uploaded already, but mannn, words can’t express how cool it is to see random pics of the kids being kids, last year’s anniversary cake, my grandpa singing, that gooey cheesesteak from five years ago, my sis painting in her studio or my spouse making some silly face… imperfect shots you would have never purposely included in a slideshow. I mean, to me, a primary purpose of cataloging and tagging is to ease finding all of these old memories and sharing them, and I just can’t think of any other method that comes close to this. Used to have Phanfare, Flickr, Photobucket, 500px, probably forgetting some, and still have Insta and Smugmug… but none have the simple ergonomics coupled with power features that we’re getting with Google, which affords us actual enjoyment of ALL our photos with minimal work.
Anywho, that’s where I’m at now. HTH!
Google has a habit of doing shit like that.
And almost a couple decades ago when we were evaluating photo management software alternatives when our budding family was young, ease of use and power were only part of the requirements.
We asked ourselves knowing it would be a very large collection… who is most likely to be around in 30-50 years?
All that tagging and folder structure took a lot of work!
For us, the answer was Adobe’s, at the time, free standing Photoshop Album.
We started on the original version and it has long since been merged into Adobe Photoshop Elements.
While its power has greatly increased, the framework is still basically the original.
Now we’re over 50,000 photos/videos (crazy, yes) and it is going strong. No regrets whatsoever, other than Adobe’s contemporary endless push to force folks into a subscription model.
We strive to regularly do both Adobe Elements internal program managed backups as well as “raw” file backups.
Haven’t decided to move over to the online thing even tho all our mobile devices are now populating our iCloud account. (We have to drag photos into our main collection for management.)