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Best Photo Management Software of 2022

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It is a variety of programs and applications that help in processing and sorting pictures. Technologies do not stand still, and progress is visible in all areas of our life. In the field of photography, there have also been changes. From paper media, photos have moved to the digital environment. Now you no longer need paper scrapbooks to store your family history; rather, you need an external hard drive. With all the advent of digital photography, most people have accumulated huge archives of photographs over the years. In order to somehow reduce and organize these pictures, you need a photo organizer.

In order for all the pictures to be easily found, viewed, processed, etc., it is needed their organization. Most often, users simply transfer photos to their home computer, and then they cannot sort them for years. This type of storage takes up a lot of storage space and is difficult to find images. In folders, there are often duplicate photos or unsuccessful frames from which you can safely get rid. But if you already have a huge archive of unsorted photos, then it will be difficult to cope alone, so the best option in such a situation would be to use the photo manager for sorting. We will talk about which program to choose and how to do the sorting correctly in this article.

Where to Store the Photo Archive?

The classic way to store all the materials on your home computer, but with high-quality photos, your hard disk space will run out in a couple of years (or even faster).

  • Then, the solution can be an external hard drive; you can store a backup copy of the entire archive on it and leave only the best photos on your computer. External drives have drawbacks; they are prone to infection by viruses and can be damaged if knocked or dropped, they will retain information for decades if handled carefully.
  • Flash drives and memory cards are also vulnerable to viruses and support a limited number of write cycles. Therefore, they are more suitable for temporary data storage or transfer from one computer to another.
  • Cloud storage is very convenient; for example, using the application, photos and videos are available even from the phone, and to share photos, you just need to send a link to the folder. A portfolio website can also be called cloud storage, where you can store your most successful pictures. Of the minuses, additional storage space will have to be purchased. Moreover, you find yourself in complete dependence on the company entrusted with your archive; whether everything will be fine with it in twenty years and whether you will then get access to your data is unknown.

Therefore, the best option is to store the archive on two different media. For example, keep the main archive on an external hard drive and periodically save a backup copy (with good photos) to a computer or the cloud.

Why is it Necessary to Archive Your Photos?

A good archive has several key properties. The most essential is that it is easy to navigate, and you can quickly find the pictures you need if you need them. It is easy to do this with suitable organizing software.

  • Another sign of a good digital archive is that it's convenient to share. Hundreds of good photos are stored in the phone's memory just to be opened again, bored in a queue, or on a long journey. But it is enough to upload photos or videos to the cloud storage and send the link to relatives. Then they will be able to choose the pictures that turned out, in their opinion, the best. And finally, a good archive is stored conveniently and safely; otherwise, its entire meaning is lost.
  • The family archive is a collection, not a dump, so you will have to work out criteria for selecting photos worth keeping. It can be divided into ordinary shots, which we rarely watch ourselves and do not show to others, and shots caught at the right moment, masterfully taken or reminiscent of important milestones in the life of a family, the loss of such photographs is akin to the loss of a family heirloom. Moreover, in any shooting, even the most successful, there will likely be pictures of both the first type and the second. The easiest way to do this is using the photo organizer, but you can do it manually.

How to Organise Your Digital Archive?

The initial sorting of photos and videos is a time-consuming but necessary step towards creating an archive. It is better to create a temporary folder, a gateway for content, before sending it to the main archive.

  • Drop what you took on your phone and camera into a temporary folder, transfer all folders with photos from your computer, memory cards, and other media.
  • Create folders for each year with subfolders of months. Then enable sorting of all your files by creation date and start categorizing materials into folders by year and month. Within each month, there can be several separate folders for different events.
  • To avoid confusion, it's best to use a specific format for folder names. It is easier for us to remember the details of an event if we see the shooting date and the place, reason, and participants.
  • A title template that will allow you to navigate thousands of pictures and videos might be like the year-month-day of the event details.
  • By doing this step by step, we will gradually bring our archive to a more visual and structured form. And with the help of organizing software, it will be much faster.

Another advantage of talking names is that, if necessary, we can quickly find all the photos with specific people using the file name search.

Make sorting a habit

  • After all the frames are ordered in the archive, it is important to maintain this order. Therefore, try to download all new files to a temporary folder immediately after shooting, delete the unsuccessful ones, save the good ones, and transfer them to the archive.
  • This habit will prevent digital dumpsters from appearing on your computer. Also, you will always know where the data is either in the archive or waiting for processing in a temporary folder.

 photo organizing

Choose the Best Photos

So, we have sorted the photos by year, month, and event. The next step is to remove the duplicate, downright bad shots and highlight the valuable photos. This stage can be broken down into several approaches. It will be more interesting if you involve other family members in the process. They may like the shots that are not the same as you, and it can also be a kind of joint journey into the past. Use a photo manager to speed up this process.

  • There are probably many identical photos in the archive; most often, they are a series of frames from which they were too lazy to delete the extra ones immediately. So you can start organizing an archive by eliminating duplicates. The search function is available in most modern management software. There are also special programs for finding duplicate images on a computer.
  • You can start deleting similar photos right on your phone using special applications.
  • After the takes are removed, go through the folders again in manual mode to remove blurry, blurry, too dark, and frankly bad shots, and at the same time separate the essential and less interesting shots.
  • It is better not to delete the second ones immediately but to move them to a subfolder. Perhaps, after a couple of years, when you look at the archive again, you will want to move some of them into the folder with good shots.
  • When this work is over, a backup copy of the successful photos must be saved on a medium separate from the main archive.

Of course, organizing software can also be used for this sorting. For example, assign a rating to each photo.

Photo Organizing Software

You will no longer have overflowing memory on your computer and randomly sorted photos. In order to put things in order, you just need to choose the right manager. Choose a photo manager that suits you and will help you put things in order.

1. Adobe Lightroom

Adobe Lightroom

Platforms

Windows, macOS

Price

from $ 8.60 per month

 

  • The professional application is used for both retouching and photo organizing. The ability to organize your archive in Lightroom is impressive.
  • It has a convenient file import and export system that will allow you to easily add pictures to your collection and sort them into folders. With this system, you can simply select the best shots for your portfolio website. Lightroom also has smart virtual folders, as well as tagging and rating photos. You can search for snapshots in the archive by keywords, metadata, and file attributes. Lightroom also supports facial recognition.
  • However, it is primarily a tool for professional photographers and avid hobbyists. For a simple organization of a home archive, its capabilities are too much, and it is expensive.

2. Corel AfterShot Pro

Corel AfterShot Pro

Platforms

Windows, macOS, Linux

Price

$85

 

  • Organizing photo processing and sorting software from competitor Adobe. The application will help you create a neat folder structure that will be easy to understand. Photos here are easily filtered by metadata; rating, keywords, dates, tags are supported.
  • In addition, photo manager AfterShot can be used to retouch pictures to optimize lighting, contrast, color, and other parameters. The application interface is somewhat overloaded with elements, but you can quickly get used to it.

3. ACDSee Photo Studio

ACDSee Photo Studio

Platforms

Windows, macOS

Price

from $ 59.99

 

Extremely popular and time-tested organizing software. There are many possibilities for organizing a collection of images. There are:

  • categories (both pre-installed and manually created);
  • ratings;
  • tags;
  • keywords;
  • geotags.

If you are not used to all the ACDSee features, you can even get confused. Batch processing, sorting, and renaming files will allow you to clean up even the largest archive in minutes. There is also an advanced editing toolkit for cropping, retouching, defects and noise, filters. These functions are perfect for organizing a portfolio website.

Free Photo Organizing Software

1. Darktable

Darktable

Platforms

Windows, macOS, Linux

Price

Free

 

  • A kind of Lightroom from the Linux world is free and open source. The program is focused on automation and is useful for those photographers who process a large number of pictures. 
  • It supports import from most modern digital cameras, sorts photos by reading geotags and metadata, and allows you to assign tags and ratings to files. In addition, Darktable has support for graphic tablets, and the functionality of the application can, if desired, be extended with the help of third-party modules.

2. DigiKam

DigiKam

Platforms

Windows, macOS, Linux

Price

Free

 

DigiKam is another free open-source management software. It was originally created for Linux but later got versions for Windows and macOS. The application supports importing photos from digital cameras, scanners, and portable drives, conveniently sorting them into albums with a hierarchical structure, filtering images by metadata and geolocation, and even face recognition. Present in DigiKam and the ability to assign tags to pictures, and the function of viewing with editing. It is one of the best free archive management software.

3. XnView

XnView

Platforms

Windows, macOS, Linux

Price

Free

 

XnView is a completely free yet very advanced viewer and photo organizer. It is naturally inferior to expensive professional packages in image editing, but XnView is enough to organize a home archive.

Batch photo processing, bulk import, and sorting lets you organize thousands of your photos into folders without any effort. Besides organizing files, XnView can also fine-tune and convert images to different formats.

4. FastStone Image Viewer

FastStone Image Viewer

Platforms

Windows

Price

Free

 

It is extremely simple yet powerful enough photo viewer with the ability to sort and catalog images.

  •  FastStone Image Viewer includes a converter of image formats and a simple graphics editor. With FastStone, you can apply filters, resize, remove red-eye, and perform simple retouching to photos.
  • FastStone can also import your pictures from a camera or memory card, reading their metadata and geolocation. And then arrange the received files into folders by the structure you specified. Pros, of course, will find organizing software FastStone not very sophisticated, but with a home archive of photos, even very voluminous, it will cope with a bang.

5. Shotwell

Shotwell

Platforms

Linux

Price

Free
  • Shotwell is an app for Linux fans. Shotwell is present in many distributions, and in those where it is not, the program can be installed in just a minute. 
  • The application is inferior in capabilities to the same DigiKam but remains an excellent tool for organizing a home album. It imports photos and videos from digital cameras, automatically grouping them by date, location, and tags.
  • The program also supports face recognition and uploading pictures to various photo storage services, including the portfolio website.

6. Adobe Bridge

Adobe Bridge

Platforms

Windows, macOS

Price

Free

  • Adobe has another management software designed to work with the Adobe Bridge media library. It doesn't have a function to edit photos, but there are more than enough sorting opportunities. They are tags, ratings, collections, dates, keywords and a lot of criteria.

This is a really high-quality tool that is useful for both pros and simply owners of large archives. The bridge was previously part of Creative Cloud and was distributed by subscription, but recently it has become entirely free.

How to Sort Video Files?

Video chronicle of family events travels and moments of ordinary life, perhaps even better than photographs, conveys the spirit of the times and people's characters. Even a few short videos a year will bring a lot of joy to you and your children in the future.

The video perfectly fulfills the external memory function; grown-up children enjoy watching family videos, and they remember their earlier childhood thanks to them.

But to make a story out of several disparate videos, you will have to learn how to work in a video editor.

  • Acquaintance with the paid program Vegas Movie Studio organizing software will take a little time, but its possibilities are much wider; the key is the imposition of several audio and video tracks. With this functionality, you can experiment as much as you like and, as a result, create high-quality films.
  • If you or your child decide to master video editing at a professional level, it is better to pay attention to Adobe Premier organizing software. Its capabilities are even greater than that of Vegas, and the interface is intuitive, especially for those who have dealt with Adobe Photoshop. The closest MacOS counterpart is Final Cut.

You can get inspiration for creating new videos in thematic communities on social networks, where they share the secrets of shooting and editing.

However, mastering the professional packages is not necessary on many modern phones; applications for creating slideshows and videos are preinstalled. You can create a short video of what you've filmed recently, such as a short sketch of a walk together, and upload the resulting file to the cloud.

It is convenient to put the finished videos into the same folders as the photos using the management software, distributing them by year, month and event. The file format will allow you to distinguish videos from photos in a folder immediately.

FAQ

  • What is the best free photo organizer software?

Here are some free programs for organizing and editing photos on your computer:

  1. Adobe bridge
  2. Darktable
  3. DigiKam
  4. XnView
  5. FastStone Image Viewer
  6. Shotwell
  • What is the best way to organize photos on a computer?

It is best to sort all photos by year, date, and events that happened. You can also add keywords by which you will be easy to navigate in your archive.

  • How to manage thousands of pictures?

The easiest way is to use the organizing software; then, you just need to organize yourself. All new photos should be immediately sorted and duplicated, and failed frames removed. Save photos to the archive; for safety, it is better to store them in two places. For example, on a computer and an external hard drive. Add tags and keywords to your photos to make them easier to find.

  • Is there an app to organize photos?

Yes, there are different applications for different software that will help you sort all your photos and organize them by tags. Applications can have additional functions such as processing, for example. The application can be either free or by subscription.

  • How do professional photographers organize their photos?

The most important thing is to make a backup. When you make money from photographs, their safety is one of the most important factors. After that, you need to deal with sorting photos immediately. Delete bad photos so that they do not take up extra space on the media. To organize all photos, it is better to sort them by folders with dates and event tags. Store your photos on several media at the same time to be sure about their safety.

  • How to organize years of photos?

Professionals recommend storing photos in several places. You can store them in the cloud, on a PC, external hard drive, or a USB flash drive.

  • Is Lightroom program good for organizing photos?

Yes, this program offers many different functions, among which is the organization of photos. You can manage photos like albums and organize them by keywords and rating.

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