How do you manage your personal photos in Windows?

Question

1. How do you manage your personal photos in Windows?
2. What programs do you use? Picasa?
3. How do you import them?
4. Do you create folders for each date of the picture or of the import?
5. What's your workflow like?
6. Do you tag them in one or another way?
7. Any secondary programs that help you with the task?

Answer 1

Picasa - it finds photos wherever I have added them, and provides some neat timelines.

As a bonus, it works on linux too - via wine, but there is an official package from google so we don't need to tinker around - most people may not even realize that it is running under wine.

Answer 2

As far as managing goes: I just put them in my Pictures folder, for each day one folder starting with the date and then a description like this:

2009-09-20 Bbq at home

Sometimes, multiple days go together in one folder (of the first day) if they're taken at one event.

This way, they can be viewed and searched with any program I like (including Windows Explorer, but also Picasa or other tools if I want more advanced stuff).

For importing I use Cam2PC, the freeware version. Really easy! Very customizable. Once set up, all you have to do is plug in your camera, and your pictures are automatically moved from your camera to your hard drive (using e.g. the date like above to create new folders), a caption is asked if necessary, and the pictures are automatically rotated (if your camera has the ability to store that information in the meta tags). Definitely much better than the default Windows Import Pictures Wizard.

Answer 3

I use Windows Live Photo Gallery for my Windows machines although I mainly use iPhoto on my Mac. Windows Live Photo Gallery was the closest possible alternative with the only what I needed features.

Answer 4

Over the course of the years, I've tried a number of (Windows) applications to manage my photos:

• Cerious Software's Thumbsplus (version 5)
• Microsoft's Digital Image Suite 10
• Google's Picasa (versions 2 and 3.5)
• Microsoft's Windows Photo Gallery (bundled with Vista) and
• Windows Live Photo Gallery (available for Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7)
• Adobe's PhotoShop Elements (versions 3 and 4)
• Picajet 2.5
• Adobe's Lightroom 1.1
• Microsoft's Expression Media
• IDimager Personal (versions 3 and 4)
• IDimager Pro (versions 4 and 5)

My groundrule for managing photo collections:

I insist that any software used in the digital workflow (transfer from camera to computer, image selection, digital processing, cataloguing, publishing and asset management) will respect any EXIF, IPTC and XMP metadata that may be stored in the image file itself.

I stopped using some of the above applications because I found they did not follow this groundrule. Some of the others had issues with their handling of image metadata. For example, Picasa still does not handle IPTC and Exif data satisfactorily, and does not even know about XMP metadata.

I've ended up with IDimager Pro as my main tool for Digital Asset Management, and Windows Live Photo Gallery as the tool used by other family members for browsing our photo collection. Both of these tools follow the groundrule, and, because of this, both share the same tag hierarchy for ease of management.

I write about some of the issues I've come across on my blog. Here's an entry point with links to my posts on photography if you're interested.

Answer 5

Regardless of the OS, I feel you should let your photo management software manage your photos, and I'll tell you why. Back in the day, I used to do it myself, and I just organized everything in folders on my hard drive that I thought best suited my organizational methods. This worked for me for several years.

Then I switched to a Mac, and wanted iPhoto to manage things for me. I quickly realized that the majority of the timestamps on my photos were wrong. I had never bothered to go into the camera and set the date and time before, and it never bothered me because I managed everything myself. So now my photos were a mess, and I kept giving myself a headache because I kept trying to do things the old way.

Finally I gave in and fixed all the timestamps on my old photos, and let iPhoto do it's thing. I'm glad I did. Why? Because now I make sure my camera has the right date & time set on it before I shoot anything. This is how it should be. Your camera writes tons of useful metadata to your digital photos called Exif data. This data is very important, and a vast majority of photo software and web services can/do use it.

Picasa has an import too that will categorize your photos in it's own way based on the Exif metadata. It will also let you keep things organized for yourself. I feel like this is because for the longest time, Windows users didn't have a better option for managing their photos, and most were used to doing it manually.

Even if you don't let your software manage your photos for you, do yourself a favor and make sure you set the date & time on the camera correctly. You'll thank me later.

Answer 6

I use Adobe Lightroom for the photos I shoot in RAW.

I also use Windows Live Photo Gallery for other pics I have on my computer. They are all in the Pictures Library.

Answer 7

I use iView Media Pro. Its successor is Microsoft Expression Media.

Answer 8

I store all my photos on my WHS and organize them (tags etc.) with Windows Live Photo Gallery. I also use JungleDisk to back them up off-site (in case of fire/flooding).

I've setup Live Photo Gallery to store all photos on my WHS machine when importing from my camera(s). And with addons to WHS I can share photos with my extended familiy. :)

Answer 9

Adobe Photoshop Elements. It's not free, but the organisation features are in my opinion much better then Picasa.

Visual tagging is great and the face recognition is even useful. But the most important recommendation is that performs well with 15,000+ photos and videos (I've installed it for a user with a large photo collection).

Answer 10

I have a series of folders on my hard drive that contains photos, I use the following naming convention:

photos\year\yyyy-mm-dd description

Which has the handy benefit of displaying the folders in date order when sorted in alphabetical order.

Answer 11

By now I'm mostly a user of Windows Live Photo Gallery, but in past times I heavily used RawShooter Essentials. The program that was bought by Adobe to become Lightroom. It was free to use at that time and I'm sure it's still out there somewhere.

ETA: By now I'm a Lightroom user.

Answer 12

I guess it depends on the number of pictures you have to handle and the complexity of your workflow.

For a small/medium number of pictures, manual file management with one folder for each date and free applications like picasa or windows live gallery for visualization and basic editing are probably the best choice.

I use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom for a couple of weeks now, and it's really a great tool if you want a more complex workflow with picture selection and some more advanced editing. But it's quite expensive (compared to free tools) and designed for advanced photographers/professionals.

Lightroom has powerful importation features. Personnally I use them for automatic folder management based on the picture date and some personalized labels. I tag them during the process. Then I make a selection of the best pictures on which I apply a basic editing workflow (exposition, color adjustement). Then I organize these best pictures in collections.

Answer 13

Flickr. I don't manage my photos offline any more. Of course if you have lots of them you need a Pro account, which is quite cheap.

Answer 14

As it is not mentioned here I want to throw FastStone Image Viewer in. It is a very good tool (similar to ACDSee) with a lot of features. I am using this tool to manage my photos (approx. 20.000) and I am very happy with it.

My photos are sorted in topics (e.g. child, vacancy) and in this topics they are sorted in folders with date (e.g. 2009-08 for photos taken in August 2009). So I am able to find photos easily.

A project of mine is to tag the photos (but because of the huge amount I didn't find the time to do this yet).

Answer 15

Can someone speak to the import/export process between these photo organizing softwares? I'm thinking of investing in Photoshop Elements and want to finally do my photo library justice by organizing/rating/tagging/geotagging it all. But, it makes me nervous to do this, thinking that the photo meta information might reside in the software rather than in the photos themselves.

I can't find a very plain discussion about this on the internet. Basically, I don't want to invest hours and days editing meta stuff about my photos in PS Elements and then, in 2 years, when I decide to upgrade to Apple Aperture or another piece of software, find that I cannot import all my tags/meta.

Answer 16

Downloader Pro is a fantastic, customisable photo downloader. I have it configured so I just put my CF card in my machine, hit the download button and all my photos appear correctly rotated in date-stamped directories ready for me to add a comment:

D:\Photos\2009-10-06 ()
D:\Photos\2009-10-05 ()
D:\Photos\2009-10-02 ()

..so I quickly add a note about what the photo's were about and voila, all sorted with minimal fuss. It's interesting to see that a few other people have arrived at the same conclusion :)