Discussion on:

Five apps to help keep your photo collections under control

Photo management falls into two areas - editing and management.

For editing (ie manipulation of an image), there are many tools - you've mentioned several including gimp and photoshop. This is a huge topic and 'best' is dictated by many factors, not the least of which is the intent of the image - commercial, art, craft, personal album, etc. It's a personal choice.

Management is another topic. As your photo collection expands, you need to collect, collate and identify images. This requires strong capabilities in keyword tagging, geographical tagging, categorising, etc. Other features that allow group conversion and distribution (eg "Hey, Dad, here's the photo's of your birthday") are essential. Shotwell has some of these features, but I prefer Picasa for it's organisational and management features. For instance, I can come home from an event, unload my photos (in RAW format), tag, geolocate, add descriptions and create an auto-loading slideshow CD of the best shots in jpg format with minimal effort. Uploading to web albums is also simple.

Dude, really?
All these are photo editing tools. They are useful but don't really fall under collection management tools. When I manage my photo collections, I look for features very similar to file managers but more tailored towards images. I won't categorise the above tools as photo collection management tools. They are for managing the photo's contents.

ACDSee at http://www.acdsee.com is one of the favourite since its old age like its v2.4

These are manipulation tools not management tools.
I use Fastone Image viewer daily, but it is not an organiser.

I too was not looking for manipulation as much as management. I literally have hundreds of thousands of photos from hundreds of sources on hundreds of topics, plus thousands of video clips, and am in desparate need of a solution broader than "windows folders". I am experimenting with Picajet but before I buy i wanted to see it EXIF and geocoding features as their trial version and marketing of the features leaves a lot of unanswered questions.

I couldn't say if it's the best but I've been pretty pleased with XN View, which can handle raw images, whole libraries, tagging, some photo editing, scripting that allows you to create things like web images from a folder of full size images, renaming, etc. It's also cross platform if that's important to you .. http://www.xnview.com/

I am a professional photographer and could not do my job without PhotoMechanic. A fantastic tool, very fast and easy to use, with tons of Flexibility. Go to: http://www.camerabits.com/site/index.html to download a free full version trial. It is simply the best tool out there in my opinion.

Were we deliberately leaving out established industry standard products?
What happened to Apple Aperture and Adobe Lightroom?

What about online options like SmugMug, FlickR, ShutterFly, Picassa, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_photo_sharing_websites, dare I say it . . .Facebook {gasp.}

You mentioned some I wasn't even aware of. Tagging and zooming does not qualify as "control" anymore in my humble opinion. Photographers need way more than that.

Having said that, I reckon Faststone to be one of the best low ends - no hassle, simple and fast.

Thanks for the article, it remains one of my special interests!

why do computer-bloggers try to write about everything ?

all these are simple image browsers, NOT image collection management tools.
image collection management tools are image databases, like thumbs plus, light-room, bibble (advanced amateurs should know them) etc.

These tools are ok if you want something to get you past your OS' file manager, but you will quickly bump into limits. For a step up from these solutions, consider Photoshop Elements. The organizer offers multiple ways to tag, store, collect and search for your images. It offers Adobe's Camera Raw processor for handling RAW files with more capabilities than the above options. It is true that once you get into the photo editor, a learning curve must be climbed, but with powerful layer processing and impressive tools, you can take your photos to places you can only dream about with a simple basic editor. This tool provides much of the capability of Photoshop CS5/6 but is a little easier to learn and whole lot less expensive. It is often on sale for under $70. There are direct interfaces to web social sites, and the ability to create unique creations such as calendars and the like. The Slide Show capability is very nice as well.

I need a management tool that can hopefully tag and annotate without my having to laboriously go through and hand id 100s of photos each time i return from a trip. where are these tools?

According to the download page of their website StudioLine Photo Basic also needs a licence for business use, and IrfanView's forum also says that it is only free for non-commercial, educational and charity use. When talking about "free" products shouldn't every writer automatically tell us when product is, or is not, free for business use? In this article it is mentioned for one product but not the others.

Irfanview is an excellent manipulation tool. You haven't mentioned its bulk processing capability, which is what I use it for the most, bulk resizing.

Management-wise I find Windows 7 is fine for me with its built-in tagging options.

I do not wish or need to pay for more complex tools to do these jobs.

http://www.albumburger.com/en/

looks hopeful. And it (says it) is free

I would like add another piece of software to the above list: XnView (http://www.xnview.com/). I use this software every day at work to view and edit photos before uploading them to a web gallery. It's free and installs to windows, with a beta version for Linux and iOS.

Also, I agree with unclepete52's criticism: image manipulation and image management are two different tasks, though many pieces of software do both, to a greater or lesser degree. I am very interested in the topic of image management at the organizational level, and I would love to hear about solutions people use at their workplaces for tackling this problem.

grumpusbumpus[at]gmail[dot][com]

Similar to the comments above, I think it's important to separate photo editing from photo management but also to separate photo management from long term photo organisation and storage. Specific to photo management, I think it's a trap to use a specific photo management application or web service and related proprietary databases because they come and go over time. In "iPhoto and Durable photo management" (http://www.agentofkaos.net/2011/09/iphoto-and-durable-photo-management.html) I explain a very simple and durable approach to storing photos I've been using for the last 12 years. I then layer on iPhoto (but take your pick - Picassa et al) on top of it for useful (but potentially transient) features.

Nice review of image viewers, but the content didn't match the promise of the title...

Where do rate Picasa and its Mutifunction Integration ?