Software and process to manage photos (Windows)

[mdarby]

Hello,

I am a new Smugmug user! Great site.

I was hoping for advice on a reasonable was for an amateur with a large collections of photos, mostly family and vacation pictures, to organize everthing.

I have used Picasa for a while. I've attempted in the past to create "albums" in Picasa but from time to time I'll disconnet my laptop from the photo hard drive. This then seems to erase the Picasa database, which then has to be re-indexed thus wiping out my albums.

My photos are currently organized by date that I downloaded to PC. I started to create some folders with meaningful names.

Ideally I'd like to have pictures organized in folders with meaningful names and containing only my favorite shots. But I'd like to rest to be findable.

Is Picasa worth sticking with? What is a reasonable process to archive all the photos I might want to use, but organize around the pictures I really like? These are the ones I would like to upload to Smugmug for others to view.

Thanks,
Michael

[claudermilk]

Have you seen this thread: http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=80540

I'll ask the same question I started with there: what OS? It's critical to specify when asking computer questions.

[storksb]

Hello,

I am a new Smugmug user! Great site.

I was hoping for advice on a reasonable was for an amateur with a large collections of photos, mostly family and vacation pictures, to organize everthing.

I have used Picasa for a while. I've attempted in the past to create "albums" in Picasa but from time to time I'll disconnet my laptop from the photo hard drive. This then seems to erase the Picasa database, which then has to be re-indexed thus wiping out my albums.

My photos are currently organized by date that I downloaded to PC. I started to create some folders with meaningful names.

Ideally I'd like to have pictures organized in folders with meaningful names and containing only my favorite shots. But I'd like to rest to be findable.

Is Picasa worth sticking with? What is a reasonable process to archive all the photos I might want to use, but organize around the pictures I really like? These are the ones I would like to upload to Smugmug for others to view.

Thanks,
Michael

Check out Adobe Lightroom. It has a great workflow for image cataloging and processing. I have been using it since March and rarely use anything else now.

Simon

[claudermilk]

I see the thread title has been revised. :) In which case, I'll echo my own recommendation from the linked thread: IMatch.

I've found that it's easiest (at least for me) to organize the images on the drive in a date-based directory structure (i.e., <root photo dir>\<year>\<yearmonth>\<specific day & event>). Once you start using the DAM, where the photos are & what the names are doesn't matter so much.

[Rhuarc]

And I will echo my own reccomendation from the linked thread: IDImager!

I think you will find that people have their favorite peices of software for various reasons. IMO you won't go wrong with either IDImager or IMatch. The best route is to get a demo for each, and use it on a small set of images (maybe several hundred) to see which one works best for what you are looking for.

Good Luck!