Photo organizing and editing software?

[hlidskjalf]

I'm looking for a software to organize all of my family photos on my PC. Currently, I just have them organized into folders, and each file is named with the date and names of people in each photo. This is not a very good way to organize my photos, especially in cases where there are many people in one photo, and the file name becomes too long.

I was looking around at some different software, but I can't find something with all of the features that I am looking for. I'm wondering if someone can point me in the right direction, to something with all of these features:

I would like to be able to add tag information to each photo. For instance, each person in the photo can be tagged, and searched for later. It would also be a plus if you could scroll over the person in the photo and have it display their name, similar to Facebook. I had found one free software that would allow you to tag individuals, and check off a box with their names and it would bring up just the photos with these people in them. Also, to be able to add other information such as the date the photo was taken, and captions or notes would be perfect.

I would need a program that would embed this data into each file, so if I were to copy these photos from my PC to another member of my family using the same program, all of this tag information would remain. I had found a free software with similar features, but it did not embed the data, so the photos would be useless on other PCs.

It would also be a huge plus if a software like this included some basic editing tools such as brightness, contrast, red-eye editing as well as a cropping tool. I'm not looking to do anything too fancy with editing, but having simple editing tools within the same program would be very convenient.

If anyone knows of a software, free or otherwise, that has all or most of these features, please let me know. Thank you for your time.

 

[bigtwinky]

I think Picassa has an auto face recognition component that finds people based on prior name tags in other photos.

If you want cataloguing and keyword searching, Lightroom is great.

Lightroom's editing is very very good

 

[tirediron]

ACDSee products are excellent

 

[Dao]

I came across with this software last week. But I am not sure if it has all the features you need. Since it is a free software, you maybe you can give it a try and see.

I think I will try that as well and see how good it is. I bought a MP3 making type software from them before and was not too bad.

MAGIX Photo Manger - Free picture editor for your fotos

 

[JClishe]

Windows Live Photo Gallery works well. We store all of our family photos on our Windows Home Server, and both my wife and I access the photos from each of our laptops. If I add photos to the gallery, tag people, and add keyword tags to the photos, etc., then the next time my wife opens Photo Gallery on her laptop, everything that I've done will show up on her laptop. And vice versa.

 

[fokker]

Lightroom does basically everything you mentioned except for the face tagging thing, but you can just write the persons names as tags and browse or sort by that name. LR also has very handy and fast editing. I found it annoying to use at first but I'm glad I persevered and it's paying off now. It's not free software though.

 

[MohaimenK]

lightroom3!

If you are a student or have a kid that's a student, get the student discount and its yours for $89

 

[Zrock]

Adobe Elements has the face recognition feature in it. Not sure if it embeds it into the file or not

 

[MWG]

I use Picasa cause you can tag faces like on facebook, you can do geo-tagging, and it has a few kid like editing tools. I use it mostly for viewing.

 

[dwhogg]

A few suggestions for organizing your photos:
1) Don't try and add "information about" your photo into the filenames themselves. Instead, use metadata (keywords, captions, ratings,...).
2) Be careful what software you use to add that metadata! You want your photo management software to store the metadata directly into the photo themselves AND do so using INDUSTRY STANDARDS. That way, anyone (including a future you) will be able to easily see that information using virtually any photo software on any computer.

Note that some software adds the metadata only into a proprietary database (eg. iPhoto) and other software adds it to your photos, but in a proprietary way (eg. ACDSee).

Google Picasa, DigiKam (both free) Lightroom, Aperture (both expensive) are all examples of software that does a good (Picasa, DigiKam) or excellent (Lightroom, Aperture) job of dealing with metadata.

You can check out my website happydigitalphotos for more details on photo organization and how various Photo Management software deals with metadata.

Good luck!

 

[hlidskjalf]

Thanks for all the info everyone! I've decided to go with Picasa 3, and it seems to do more or less everything I was looking for, and best of all it's free!

Does anyone know how to edit the default photo it sets when you create a new person for the "People" folder? I started to tag people with the face regocnition feature, and it would set the first photo as their default picture that shows up in the "People" folder. Is there a way to change this default photo?

 

[Croissant Seven]

I love editing in Lightroom, but I can't figure out for the life of me how to get it to catalog the pictures in an intuitive manner. Does anyone have a good tutorial link I can peruse?