Top Digital Photo Software for Family Photos
Tuesday December 11, 2007
Digital photo software is designed for people who want to organize and share personal and family photos, but don't want to spend a lot of time editing them. In addition to helping you browse and sort through your image collection, they also allow you to catalog your media with keywords, descriptions and categories. These tools usually do not offer pixel-level editing capabilities, but they do provide easy, one-click corrections plus printing and photo sharing features.
• Top Digital Photo Software for Family Photos
• Top Digital Photo Software for Family Photos
If you just need something to browse and quickly view your photos in folders, check out the Top Thumbnail Image Browsers for Windows.
Comments
Post your suggestions for digital photo software for home users. Your suggestions may be included in future updates to my Top Digital Photo Software for Family Photos article.
ACDSee. I’ve used Picasa, Adobe Photoshop Album, and tested others, and so far, none have the speed, flexibility or features of ACDSee. They don’t lock you in, you can export your entire database to XML, you can copy your tags into the EXIF data, do tags searches (both and AND or), and many, many other things. I actually did a small writeup on some of these apps a long time ago here - http://frozenpixels.wordpress.com/managing-your-photos/
I highly recommend FastStone Image Viewer. It’s great for downloading and organizing. I especially like its ability to compare up to four images on the screen at once. That really helps when I’m trying to decide between bracketed versions of the same scene.
You should take a look at Faststone Image Viewer-Simple, quick and nimble. I have used every version of Adobe Elements and will be buying Version 6 soon, but this Faststone is beautiful for simply viewing the photos and it can catalog also.
Thanks for all the FastStone recommendations. For the record, it does not fit all my criteria for this category, but I have it listed in my Top Thumbnail Image Browsers for Windows article.
I wish you’d take a look at the software sold by Creative Memories (a 20 yr.old company that specializes in “guaranteed” photo-safe products. The software called Memory Manager is only $39.00 and will do what most higher priced software does without much of a learning curve. It will not only organize photos (you can type in 2 names and find pictures with only those 2 people in them) but also edit (clone,remove/add color, red-eye, adjust horizon, etc) but also let you create an album from the pictures. For the money - it’s GREAT and I don’t have to be computer-savvy to use it!
Check out CaptureNX by Nikon - a full-featured editor which, to me at least, is much easier to navigate than the Adobe offerings.
IDImager is hands down the most powerful and versatile photo management system there is, and has the best customer support out there. It can be used just to categorize images, or for so much more - creating web pages, editing, sharing, creating slideshows, etc. Great.
I would love to see you review Creative Memories program - Memory Manager. I have used Picasa for years and about 1.5 years ago moved to this program (because of Picasa’s limitations at the time). I love Memory Manager. I have also used Photoshop but it’s just too overwhelming (I think) for the non-professional user.
I look forward to your reply.
On the enterprise level, VeriPic seems to have the best product out there.
I’ve looked at various cataloging applications but haven’t found what I am after. I need something that lets me add multiple data to each photo without it being in the file name. However I don’t want it to reorganise my current cataloguing. I want to be able to search for and photos by any word in the captions. Any suggestions?
Michael: Several of the ones in my list should be able to do what you are asking for, unless I am not understanding your issue. Why don’t you come to the discussion forum and tell us a little more about your current system and how you feel it falls short.
Creative Memories’ Memory Manager 2 is very good for the hobbyist. What I like about it is you can easily journal about the photograph. I also like that you can list the date as a just a year (works great for all those photos I had digitized!) Plus, the organizational hierarchy it uses is intuitive for me. I have a Mac and I run both OS X and XP on it. I have iPhoto on the Mac side and Memory Manager on the XP side. I keep trying to get used to iPhoto, but I just don’t like it as much as Memory Manager.
I find that several programs I’ve tried/researched do what Vista’s Photo Gallery does. Is that, free with the OS, not worth mentioning in your list or do any programs you know of perform way better than that? Do you mind emailing me your thoughts?
Samir: I’ve written about it here: http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/freesoftware/ig/Free-Graphics-Software/Windows-Live-Photo-Gallery.htm
I just haven’t updated my list since adding it to my site. I will probably go in the #3 slot when I do my next revision. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.
Is there no product that allows essentially unlimited key word tagging of photos, without unwanted editing functions? The desire here would involve a program that could sort photos’ key word tags on multiple terms (like the 2007 version of Microsoft Excel).
For example, a single request of the program might ask for all photos tagged with any of the following terms ‘Uncle Jimmy’, ‘garden’, ‘vegetable’, ‘2008′.
@Ambassador: Several in my list can do that. Give them a try.
Creative Memories Memory Manager has features that leave the competition in the dust for its $39.95 price. The organizational system allows me to find any image of any person doing anything at anytime in approximately 1 second. It keeps track of what I’ve printed, has automatic backup, lets me document details in a journal box that’s tied to the photo. WOW! I love it! You can go to http://www.creativememories.com to find a consultant to order it from.
Here’s another rec for Creative Memories Memory Manager - on sale now for $29.95 and it is due for an upgrade in April that will be just $10 for current and new users. The upgrade will offer great new functionality for editing (including picture to picture clone). The organizational system can’t be beat and it is really easy to tag a file multiple times without making duplicate copie of the file.
Thumbsplus by Cerius is an excellent cataloger. The built in editting features are pretty good, too.
I made a mistake and switched from
Thumbsplus to Photoshop Elements cataloger and…what a mess. The photoshop cataloger is ridiculously buggy, at least on my machine. I upgraded the software and…the newer version is just as buggy. In a one month period it has crashed 166 times…locked up, lost thumbnails, etcetera. Painful but with several thousand images it’s now almost as painful to switch away from it.
@Adrian: This is not typical behavior. If Photoshop Elements is crashing that much for you, there is something wrong on your system. This article has some suggestions which may help: http://graphicssoft.about.com/cs/faq/a/troubleshooting.htm