IrfanView

The article title suggested you were going to give some advice on how to sort ourselves out. As far as I am concerned you showed us some good screenshots of some tools I had never heard of but gave me no pluses and minuses for different situations.

I also use Picasa by the way - so a comparison with that app would have been useful.

An article setting how to manage photo's coming in from iPad / iPhone would be really useful.

I though I was going to get some selection of Photo Management tools not photo touch up.

My ideal photo management app should include a way to move and organize them as if you were doing it on table with printed ones. Being able to dynamically move photos around in a sequence helps me to create the story.
I like Picasa because I can edit, manage, upload to G+ and my tablet, plus create movies and collages all for FREE.

I think KPhotoAlbum (available only in LINUX as far as I know) can meet most of your basic requirements, if I understand them correctly. The documentation is not as clear as for some of the commercial Windows software options. The basic organization is by EXIF date (if you choose this option), but you can organize it by folders, or by "tags" (e.g. you can look at all the photos in which "Fred" appears in photos taken in "Italy", etc.). Of course the big job in any such package is to properly organize the folders containing the photos and to enter the information about the subject, the people or objects contained, the locations, etc. In KPhotoAlbum (KPA), the terminology is "Annotate" which is similar to "Tag" in other software but more powerful. KPA does NOT do any editing of photos itself. It does not change the photos on disk, but allows you to invoke external photo editors to modify the actual photo. You can mix photos and video clips with no problem.
You can also view as slide shows, etc. and create web pages although I have not done much of that, and I think the html output is a bit primitive compared to something like JAlbum.
Murray

I use Pro Show Gold by Photodex - unlimited photos and video with cool transitions, motion effects, ability to add (music with simple editing capability) and themes for creating shows fast and publishing to UTube or .EXE, DVD, etc. You need a robust system. Gold is the middle version between the simpler Pro Show and Producer. You get free upgrades for a year with the purchase.

Any suggestions for being able to quickly create a slideshow that contains pictures and video? I just want to be able to randomly select some of each and play them back. Unless you actually want to create a "movie" out of them, it seems that so many players draw a hard delineation between them. I finally got wmp to have the right codecs to playback my .mov files, but i can't get it to add them to the library so i can't create a playlist with my jpegs and .movs. i'm running xp home with wmp 11. i found a guy on-line who couldn't prevent wmp from adding .movs to his library. i wish i had that problem. any recommendations?