Photo management & EXIF editor advice

[Hannah_I]

Hi, first time poster here..

I have thousands of digital photos stored which currently have no order to them other than being saved in folders in the Windows directory. I would like to start the mammoth task of cataloging them and organising them but need advice on what the best (for not FREE) software to do this is.
I'm looking to edit the EXIF data to include for example; Geographic location, identify people in the photos, other keywords which I can later search by etc.

Having done a quick Google I see plenty of free software packages for editing EXIF data but will these be sufficient for all my cataloging requirements and have you any specific suggestions based on experience.

Many thanks...

 

[john.margetts]

Digikam - both free and excellent.
digiKam - Photo Management Program | Manage your photographs as a professional with the power of Open Source

 

[snowbear]

Adobe Lightroom can be used to catalog photos. You can set up collections to put them in as well as assign key words (tags) for searching. The key words need only be typed once, then appear as a list with check boxes so you can choose which ones to apply to a photo. LR has the added advantage of basic post-processing functions. I use LR (and older version) for 90%, or so, of my processing. "Keepers" are key worded and then published to Flickr (a collection). As far as on-disk organization, by default they are set up chronologically, by year ans month, which works for me.

If you are not going to be processing / tweaking the photos, and only want to organize them, a database, such as Microsoft Access or even a spreadsheet like Excel might do. The downside is you cant use those to modify EXIF or add key words, and you would have to (as far as I know) have to type the data for each photo.

Adobe products and Microsoft Office are now subscription-based so you will have to keep paying for them. There are other databases and spreadsheets available, but I don't know how good or bad they are,

 

[table1349]

The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers: Peter Krogh: 9780596523572: Amazon.com: Books

An outstanding read if you want to organize Digital files.

I am curious, why do you want/need and exif editor? Keywords ect. can be added in what ever program you use to catalog you files.

 

[KmH]

Yep. I'll second The DAM Book.

One of the issues I have with Lightroom is that it can only open, and search, 1 catalog at a time.
Because of that many experts recommend that you put ALL your photos in 1 catalog when using Lr.
Unfortunately, at some point that 1 catalog has so many images in it Lr performance starts to suffer necessitating starting another catalog.

If your entire collection is fewer than 20,000 or so images Lr will work great. Once your entire collection starts getting to 50,000 or so images Lr doesn't work so great, because Lr doesn't have a hard limit to the number of images in a catalog.

To avoid those issues I use Phase One Media Pro for cataloging my image database. Media Pro does have a catalog hard limit - 128,000 images.

I also put licensing and contact information in the IPTC fields that are part of the Exif data, in addition to keywording.

 

[Hannah_I]

The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers: Peter Krogh: 9780596523572: Amazon.com: Books

An outstanding read if you want to organize Digital files.

I am curious, why do you want/need and exif editor? Keywords ect. can be added in what ever program you use to catalog you files.

Thanks for your recommendation. Maybe I don't require an EXIF Editor for what I require, I am fairly new to all of this and that was just my understanding at the time.

 

[Hannah_I]

Adobe Lightroom can be used to catalog photos. You can set up collections to put them in as well as assign key words (tags) for searching. The key words need only be typed once, then appear as a list with check boxes so you can choose which ones to apply to a photo. LR has the added advantage of basic post-processing functions. I use LR (and older version) for 90%, or so, of my processing. "Keepers" are key worded and then published to Flickr (a collection). As far as on-disk organization, by default they are set up chronologically, by year ans month, which works for me.

If you are not going to be processing / tweaking the photos, and only want to organize them, a database, such as Microsoft Access or even a spreadsheet like Excel might do. The downside is you cant use those to modify EXIF or add key words, and you would have to (as far as I know) have to type the data for each photo.

Adobe products and Microsoft Office are now subscription-based so you will have to keep paying for them. There are other databases and spreadsheets available, but I don't know how good or bad they are,

Thanks for your comments, I've been considering LR but for now would like to find a Free solution. The PS & LR CC option is very tempting though!

 

[Hannah_I]

Digikam - both free and excellent.
digiKam - Photo Management Program | Manage your photographs as a professional with the power of Open Source

Thanks John, this looks very interesting. I am going to download this and give it a try.