Digital Photography is not only different from the aspect you use memory instead of film. The after taking the photo process is different too. You don’t have to wait to get them processed, you don’t have to dig out the light box and eye piece.
Ok so the processing is connecting to your computer, and the looking at is done using a browser. Well yes, but what happens when you get too many photo’s to deal with by file name, or even renaming them to a description, that’s when you need a real image browser.
There have been a few out there on the market for a while. The first one, other than Camedia (although I have never tried the newest release I was never instantly impressed with it) that comes with Olympus products I came across was Thumbs Plus from Cerious software was one I was put onto by a digital photographer friend of mine. It was a good start, I now knew there were better products out there. The Mickey Mouse, kindergarten look of Thumbs plus though meant to be friendly looking looked bad, and the program lacked plug ins and add ons that would make for so much more fun to be had. I then found a company who impressed me with several products they had, so I thought I would try their image browser. FCoders IBrowser seemed to be a better step in the right direction.
I had now tried 3 products, each of which had their good merits and bad. I still wanted one that mixed up all the good bits. And left out the bad.
Enter ACDSee 3.0 the first version I was to trial. It was fantastic it did everything, but no wait, my colleague gives me ACDSee power pack 4.0 just a week later. It’s like a Twighlight zone.
ACDSee has now got many power packs and suites, all containing more than the last but here is the basics.
ACDSee Image Browser.
·Browse manage and store images easily (I mean easily)
·Edit images easily, exposure (including Fuzzy Logic ..you’ll love it),
rotation, resizing … all Lossless as well .. so you EXIF data and image
don’t change in anyway .. they just end up looking the right way up, the
right size .. with well some exposure touch ups.
·Group images into favourites folder, or create albums, both just link to
images no duplication, or extra MB needed to store the same image
twice.
·Make Screen Saver with FotoAngelo
·Edit images (although not the best does a good job)

Basically if you are serious about digital photography you need a serious image management tool, and it doesn’t get any better than ACDSee.
http;//www.acdsystems.com

Have you ever looked at IRFANVIEW?

It is Freeware.

http://www.irfanview.com/
http://www.ryansimmons.com/users/irfanview/
http://members.chello.at/irfan.skiljan/

it’s a bit how they all started out.
Although impressive amount of file formats accepted and is quite fast too ... I have a feeling the fastness comes from the lack of add-ons.

It is just a viewer ... not a management tool.
nice but not what i need to deal with the amount of digital pics i go through.

thanks for the info.

Giles

Ahem… I use iPhoto for my photo library.  Then again, I’m one of “those Mac guys”. 

I use Breeze Browser and Downloader Pro for my picture management

http://www.breezesys.com/index.htm

None of the above I use a Powerbook G4 with iPhoto and Adobe PS.  I tend to use metatags to arrange and search my photos within PS file browser.  However, I can imagine things will become a bit unmanagable sooner rather than later so will have to look at other options.

Rgds,

Dave

I just stumbled upon this forum and wanted to state that I completely disagree with author of this base article. I have over 27 GB of digital images that I manage, and I’ve found that ThumbsPlus is the best image management software available.  Note, I don’t use it for image editing.  I use PhotoShop for that.

ThumbsPlus utilizes a queriable [Access] database which can be set up to contain keywords from IPTC fields, internal file comments, attributes, etc, etc.  Perhaps the original author didn’t have a chance to utilize these features as the power of the features aren’t obvious until you try to manage large volumes of images.

While I don’t use TP for image editing, I do use it for batch file processing.  This is things like resizing images for the web, file type conversions, color correction, renaming, sharpening, etc.  It can also generate web pages, but I find Arles from Digital Dutch’s is the best program that I’ve found for web page creation.

My web site, [url=http://www.GeoffSchultz.org]http://www.GeoffSchultz.org[/url], has over 4500 images on it covering my sailing and diving adventures throughout the majority of the Caribbean.  Unfortunately most of my diving photos remain unscanned, but I’m moving to digital for that too.

-- Geoff

One i found the other day for just browsing and maintaining a photo database is picasa from http://www.picasa.com

Very fast has basic manipulation features, but as above I use Photoshop for that.

hi,
reading all this threads and… think, i’m living on an other planet.
working, looking with adobe phtoshop and organize with self created data management system, looks/work like exel. im lucky with this solution and the managment of my ca 3800 photos its simple.and free!
tom

Hi newsearay

Well if you are using Adobe Photoshop, it is not free for sure.

Have you looked at Gimp? That would be free.
There are very many plugins. Sadly no plugin for directly enhance underwater pictures.

i use photoshop bridge

Hello,

have yoe ever looked at IMatch from Photools?
Im using it for a couple of years. At first time you have to learn a lot because it is not simple and some parts of the uer interface are stupid :?
But i found its one of the most powerfull management systems (at this price).

And one important feature is to store everything out of its database into the IPTC data embedded in the image. So if I change the software in the future I can hopefully store this information in the new system.
The next version will also support and fully integrate the XMP sidecar format.

Ulrich

Ok the discussion is over a year old, but what has changed since then? we had a lively
discussion in the german forum boards about the pro’s and con’s of adobe lightroom vs.
apple aperture! anybody using it? any experiences? any favours? 

I’m still in the process of sorting out how I can adapt my workflow to lightroom
respectively checking out if adobe lightroom will do all things i would like to make
my life easy.

/lars