My photo-organization strategy works something like this: Drag off stick, plunk in /photos/year-month_activity — viola. At this point I have about 6,000 pics. about 60% of those are duplicates, evidence of my “Well if I take 6 pics of <blah> one of ‘em has gotta turn out” philosophy. And did I ever bother to go back and sort out the one good from each set of duplicates? nah…
So I need to be able to organize my photos. I’ve got to do some purging. it would be nice to catalogue by keyword and make things searchable. This requires an organizational photo tool.
Critera:
- has to handle camera raw
- not choke on big libraries
- preferably hook up to Gallery2 and some photo printing gizmos
- playing nice with mac shinies is a bonus
I tried iView Media Pro a while ago and was unimpressed by their proprietary tagging & buggy Intel/Universal release. Now they’ve been bought by those yahoos up in Redmond, WA and I’d really rather keep my media in better hands.
That leaves Lightroom Beta, iPhoto, and Aperture (am I missing anything?) – iPhoto does kinda handles RAW and it plays nice w/all the mac-happy gizmos, but it lacks the versioning and export abilities, editing and stacking that I’ve come to like in Aperture. Lightroom has a learning curve, promises to be spendy, and doesn’t integrate with other macish shinies. Aperture is horribly expensive at $300.00 for a licensed copy, it integrates with Some mac gizmos, and it pretty much does what I need (or will do whenever they get around to releasing a camera raw patch for the D40…). Oh, and the learning curve was pretty tame. We like that. But $300… ouch. Would be nice if some selfless soul would develop a gimp media manager open source coolie. Likely too good to be true though. *sigh*
Addendum:
After reading Martin Paling’s notes about iPhoto Alternatives, I may check out Picture Arena
2 Responses to “media organization nightmares..”
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I played a little with Lightroom while it was in beta, just never really got the feel for it and I needed something right then that I could import all of my photos into. I used iPhoto for a while and it worked. However, once I found Aperture I couldn’t get away from it. The complete control you have over your photos is amazing. The price tag is painful though and it has a lot of features that I have yet to use…
I’d still reccomend Picture Arena, there are some UI criticisms that i have of it but nothing major. A lot of its photo editing features can be done better in photoshop obviously but its core value for me is that it doesn’t mess with the actual location of my files.
Cheers