Photo Management Software – Part 2
This is a continuation of another post about some photo management software programs. In Photo Management Software, Part 1, some free software was recommended. This time some programs that you can purchase will be looked at. These are generally used by graphic artists and photographers who have larger numbers of photos and images to manage. Many of these allow for photo correction or editing. Some of these programs are used by digital scrapbookers, too. Since these programs have such a variety of features, it makes sense to use their 30 day trial downloads before you buy any of them.
ACDSee Photo Manager 2009: Lets you quickly view and find photos, fix flaws, and share your favorites through e-mail, prints and free online albums. Claims to be the fastest viewing software around. They have tutorials available and is very reasonably priced.
StudioLine Photo Classic 3 Plus: This is the upscaled version of their free program (StudioLine Photo Basic), This is a convenient, powerful and easy-to-use software for editing and managing extensive image collections for any digital photography user. With this software you can give your photos descriptions, assign tags or keyword, view them in albums, and even give them ratings, Workshops help you learn to use this one. For Windows users.
Aperture: From Apple, this is a really nice program, but it requires a MAC with fairly hefty system requiements. They’ve just releaed Aperture 2, which is supposed to browse faster through your images and has 100+ new features. This photo editing and management software is designed for managing large photo libraries and allows for the importing, management, enhancement, and delivery of photos in a single, integrated workflow that dramatically streamlines every aspect of digital photography.
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2: Enables you to quickly import, process, manage, and showcase your images — from one shot to an entire shoot. With Lightroom 2, you spend less time in front of the computer and more time behind the lens. Again, this is designed for digital photographers, but is useful to anyone who needs to organize digital photos and images. It also integrates with Adobe Create Suite and is available for the MAC or the PC.
Extensis Portfolio 8.5: Available for Windows or MAC and surprising affordable, this software will help you handle the tasks of locating, organizing or sorring, archiving and publishing your digital work quickly. There is a really good review of this at ephotozine. I think what the author of the review has to say is better than anything I can come up with – if you are interested in this software, I recommend you read that article. Let me just quote one thing from it here, though:
“While there are a number of worthy features in Portfolio – including the ability to read and extract metadata from Photoshop CS3 and camera RAW files, the interface has the feel of a Mac application dumped onto PC, the sorting and archiving options don’t work as well as they should and there’s a lack of inspiration in the design and implementation of the program. It’s all a little plodding and doesn’t offer enough over and above what the Windows Vista interface can already do.”
Photools IMatch: A professional program with support, forums and rich in features. IMatch 3 is the Image Management Solution for photo professionals, graphic artists, serious amateur photographers, librarians, scientists, and all other users who need powerful image management software. Organize and categorize your images in many ways. Integrates with many other programs. Create and use albums, categories, keywords, View, find, transform, rename and convert your images. It’s really not that expensive, either!
Thumbsplus 7: From Cerious Software, they describe their software as “the most effective, elegant and inexpensive way to locate, view, edit, print and organize your images, metafiles, fonts and movies.” It will even build web pages for you! This is only for Windows, and they have no immediate plans for a UNIX or MAC version.
Without knowing more about your business, hobbies or workflow needs, it’s hard to make an actual recommendation, hoperully some of the product suggestions made here will give you options you may have not known about.
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