What's the best way to manage a large font collection?

Question

I have a good many fonts (I'm a bit of a dafont.com junkie), which slow my computer down a great deal when opening Photoshop, Word etc. I just tried to open Character Map and it took about 2 minutes to show a window. Is there an easy way to enable/disable certain fonts?

Obviously there's quite a limited set I need to use day-to-day, but when I'm doing graphics work I'd like to be able to (ideally) choose fonts to 'enable', then use reload character in Photoshop to import them, or otherwise just enable the full set.

A good program would also make it easy to browse/categorize my font collection, but I appreciate that this is asking a lot, just the ability to exclude the bulk of them most of the time would be very handy!

Answer 1

You can use a font manager, which will allow you to easily view fonts and also enable particular sets of fonts on the fly, so that you do not have large unmanageable font lists to trawl through in your applications. Here is a list of font managers.

I use Extensis Suitcase.

Answer 2

Fontmatrix is also a good and free choice.