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Photo Management Tip



Photo Management Software.


A person new to digital photography thinks primarily about snapping good shots and not photo editing and management. Photo management isn't considered until the number of photos becomes unwieldy. By this time, there is no photo organizational structure or descriptive data saved with the photos. The better approach is to evaluate photo management software first and your answer to a photo editor may just fall into place.

Some photo managers/editors are designed primarily to sell you new products and services. Be wary of these and do not be fooled by all the glitz. Consider how you want to organize your photos and look for managers that allow you to do it your way. See my tip on photo organization.

If you intend to identify your photos with descriptions and keywords, then stick with managers that embed this information into the photo file itself (EXIF or IPTC metadata). This way, others can access this information with managers that can read the embedded data. Almost all photo managers use a proprietary database to store photo descriptions and keywords. If you use one of these managers and decide to change to another, you will need to manually re-input all the data and that can be a sizeable job.

Here are four good photo managers that are free to try or freeware:

  1. ACDSee Photo Manager - This is by far the most powerful photo manager I have come across. It is the photo manager that I use. The feature I like best in ACDSee that I could not find in other managers is the ability to embed descriptive data with the photo file and be able to search on it. I place people's names in the EXIF description field along with other bits of information. I can then search all my photos and retrieve only those of the person searched. ACDSee has a limited built-in editor but ACDSee easily integrates with other editors.

  2. Adobe Photoshop Elements - This program was mainly an editor until version 3 when a photo manager was integrated with it. Version 3 included a redesign for beginners and it made the program somewhat slower and more awkward for experienced users. As such, I stayed with version 2 and it is my primary photo editor.

  3. FastStone Image Viewer (freeware) - This program got high ratings as a viewer/manager. It has some editing abilities but quite limited. If you want a free viewer/manager, this is the one to install. If the editing abilities are not sufficient for you, there are nice freeware editors described in the Photo Editing Tips.

  4. Picasa (freeware) - Picasa is a powerful, yet easy to use and attractive tools suite to manage and organize your digital images and photos. It offers one simple place to organize, enjoy, and share your pictures. After installing, the software can automatically scan your drive(s) for images and intelligently sort them into photo albums, ready for you to customize and organize. It offers different interface layouts and ways to view your pictures, including slideshow and a unique timeline feature. Picasa supports import from twain devices, including digital cameras, photo emailing, printing and much more. A great, all-around imaging tool! Now with Picasa Web Albums, this allows you to upload free image galleries, hosted by Google.


If you have never downloaded software before, check my file download tip.
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