photo organizing software

[ta240]

Is there a good, free or cheap, program for organizing photos?

 

[milw50717]

What features are you looking for ?

Galleries, ability to tag, able to handle videos, user accounts, etc ?

FWIW I use piwigo for simple chronological/folder based sets of low-res photos for family access.

IAP

 

[Katji]

How do you want to organise them? Windows File Explorer does it well enough for me. Folders, subfolders to organise by subject matter or whatever,...display/view as details, list, big icons, small icons,...\ and then there's FSViewer (FastStone Viewer), great, excellent viewer, post-processing and so on, it provides a different sort of file browser view.

 

[Blumlein 88]

On Windows FastStone viewer is pretty good.

 

[Katji]

Right up there with Mp3tag. I feel bad about how much benefit I've had from it over the years, for free....I should check the website.
And the post-processing, well, I use my phone camera most of the time, but I eventually stopped using the Canon software, FSViewer is quicker and easier and i'm sure the image quality it produces is just as good.

 

[ta240]

thanks for the replies.

mostly looking for chronological order but with ability to tag to aid in sorting.

 

[FooYatChong]

Adobe Bridge CC is very powerful and completely free.
Sign up for a free Creative Cloud account with Adobe and download it. Bridge will legally continue to work after your trial ends.

 

[gingerbeer]

Mylio is worth a look, as it has one of the better face tagging implementations. 30 day trial from memory, not free but good (and if you have a big library you will spend a long time sorting, filtering, etc, so choose wisely!)

 

[jtwrace]

https://mylio.com/

 

[Not dave]

All of the DAM features in Lightroom work without payment. It’s just the develop and maps modules that you need a licence for.

 

[restorer-john]

mostly looking for chronological order but with ability to tag to aid in sorting.

The Windows10 inbuilt photos 'app' is actually much better than you'd think. It has a great chronological interactive sidebar, the pictures are nicely arranged and you can create folders, index whatever you want. I dismissed it at first, but now it has become my viewer of choice.

Here's chronological scrubber bar

 

[Wes]

Apple's built in thing will work fine if you have a mac. Or just name your folders (sub-dirs).

 

[concorde1]

If you can find it, Fotoalbum free version from Fototime is amazing. Or Fotoalbum Pro.

I just looked on their website and Fototime has "ceased operations", but if you can find it safely, it's better than anything else I've used. Version 7.0.8 is what I have (2021) I think it's the last update they had.

 

[lensii]

I'm really late to this, but im making an app that uses AI to give scores to each photo to tell you how good they look, so its easy to tell which ones you want to keep and which ones to throw away.

itll also be able to group up a bunch of similar looking photos together so you can easily pick the best shot out of a group. i have a beta list at https://www.getlensii.com/ if you want to see more details

 

[Wes]

how does the AI part of it work?

 

[lensii]

how does the AI part of it work?

for now just a database with scores based on votes and a neural network. Might touch on the logic a bit more later!

 

[Wes]

the votes will be used for training?

 

[lensii]

the votes will be used for training?

yes

 

[thunderchicken]

I've used a bunch of them professionally- Aperture, Lightroom, Capture One, and Photo Mechanic. I keep going back to Lightroom. It's really easy to use. Capture One is slightly more powerful, but far less intuitive to use. Lightroom combines the functionality of Bridge and Photoshop in a really helpful way.

 

[Wes]

LR would be fine if Adobe didn't own it; use a subscription model; release bug ridden software...