Digital Photo organizing

[Ironhorse]

So my wife takes a ton of good pictures with her Nikon DSLR, to the tune of over 25,000 currently stored in Picture Project. She takes both personal (family), car club and reference photos (she's an equine artist), and therefore needs a good organizational system.

She is currently using Picture Project, which came with her camera a few years ago. It's not bad, it does a decent job of cleaning up and organizing pictures in different groupings etc., but we have outgrown it and it is no longer supported.

Does anyone have any input on what else is available on the PC platform? She needs to be able to organize as well as correct / crop / modify. Thus far one person suggested Adobe Lightroom 2, but I haven't tried it yet (didn't feel like creating an Adobe account etc.). Moving all her picture collections intact is obviously very high on the list.

[Flaming Choy]

I would recommend lightroom as well. You could import each group as a separate collection to maintain your grouping, and use tags to further organize your photos. It also contains a pretty powerful photo correction/editing system and can export your photos to many different formats. The down side is it is fairly expensive.

[Dion]

Picasa 3

http://picasa.google.com/

[OBCT]

My top two suggestions have already been mentioned! The honourable mention still goes to Photoshop (for the ultra-powerful correction features, not ease of use) but it sounds like it is much less appropriate for your needs than the Lightroom or Picasa.

Adobe Lightroom is a great option for professional and serious amateur applications. As Flaming Choy mentioned, the editing and exporting features are excellent; the depths of control from A to Z are top notch.

The main drawbacks for the average person are cost (~$300), learning curve (not horrendous, but there are features that must be learned in order to make the investment worthwhile), and system requirements (good and bad; Lightroom is not a lightweight program, and your computer needs to have some guts to power it's many functions optimally).


Picasa 3 is a wonderfully intuitive program for the average amateur photographer -- and it's free! While lacking many of the powerful tweaking tools available in more expensive options, the 'bare essentials' are all there. One of Picasa's biggest strengths is it's customizability from importing to selecting/sorting/viewing to export. I find the layout, controls and aesthetics to be very user friendly.

The learning curve to perfecting Picasa is mild, IMO. The system requirements are moderate, though substantial processing power, and most importantly, ample RAM, are always helpful when dealing with very large numbers of high-res photos.