Just wondering what software people use to manage their photos (if any). After using nothing but Windows to manage my photos for many years, I started needing something to manage my growing collection - especially after I bought a digital camera and started taking a LOT more photos than I had before. I tried Adobe Photoshop Elements for a while and found it okay - but it wasn't really fast enough or powerful enough for what I wanted. More recently I bought a copy of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom - which is designed more for professional photographers, but is simple enough to use for day-to-day photo management, and is very fast and easy to use. I love it! I haven't been using the new Lightroom 2 beta, but from what I've heard, the improvements will be worth the wait - I'll be updating as soon as it is released. I now have something like 20,000+ photos that take up over 260GB of drive space
I have yet to find a single piece of software that does everything I want it to do! I have tried Photoshop Elements but really didn't get on with the user interface, so I went back to Paint Shop Pro for image editing. Some of its post-processing tools are great. For file management I tried Picasa 2 and although I liked its simplicity the printing options are very limited. So I now use FastStone Image Viewer for viewing and organising images, and it also does simple edits like cropping and rotating very well. Plus it's free. I also have Pentax Photo Lab for RAW conversion but I rarely shoot RAW anyway. Lastly I use PTGui for stitching panoramas - it's brilliant.
Yeah, I found Photoshop Elements to be a bit cumbersome - and it didn't like large volumes of photos. Photoshop Lightroom is far more intuitive in my opinion - it has been designed from the ground-up with professional photographers in mind and lays everything out in a way that can fit in with most people's workflow. It's also much quicker than Elements when dealing with large volumes of files and indeed with larger files in general (Elements won't let you process very large files like high resolution scans - while Lightroom is generally okay with it). However, I did find that limiting the number of photos in each Lightroom catalog did help with performance - I originally had all my photos in the one catalog and found it getting slower and slower ... so I've now split to using multiple catalogs which has helped. Lightroom has excellent RAW handling as well, with DNG support now too. I agree with you on this one - I came across the recommendation for PTGui on another discussion forum and have been amazed at the results. The panoramas I've uploaded to the gallery recently were stitched with PTGui.
iPhoto is great but... Recently made the switch from iPhoto to Aperture, and it has changed my photography life. I know its a little expensive, but trust me it is totally worth it. The RAW support is untouchable, the workflows are endless and the editing options are far greater and easier to use than anything else on the market. If you have any questions about it, I'll be happy to answer some. Happy clicking!
Just as an update to this, I decided last week to go back to a single large catalog to make it easier to search for and find photos from my collection (30,000+ photos now, not including the scans I'm making of my parents' slides and my wife is making of her family's photos). It's slower if you try and manipulate the photos in the large catalog, but I found it is very easy to export a set of photos to a new smaller catalog to do processing on them, and then import them back in again to the master catalog once you've finished.
I've gone insane with the amount of pictures I have, and the software that windows has to view pictures is awful.. especially since they don't rotate the images right (that may be my fault....) But I quite like Adobe Bridge. I've tried using lightroom, but I get distracted by all the other stuff. Once I get my stuff in order, I may switch over to lightroom.
