Without making a thorough or rigorous survey of all the tools available for sorting and keeping track of new photos as they enter your system let me say this about that. There are weak links in the chain.
A few years ago I pulled most of my photos together into JASC’s Photo Album 5, a really helpful system since sold to COREL. The new owners celebrated the acquisition by developing and marketing an incompatible program called COREL Photo Album 6. Note that the predecessor bought by COREL was JASC Photo Album 5. Does the number 6 follow the number 5?
Well, for openers, not really. Number 5 was a successful package, and the COREL newbie (Number 6) seems to utilize much of the convenience of the former. But sometimes the apple falls quite far from the tree. Photo Albums 5 and 6, though distinguished nominally only by version numbers, admit their differing data base managers are perfectly incompatible.
Looking back, I’ve built a modest collection of four thousand digital or digitized photos across the last ten years by digitizing old film or by taking pictures for the last five years with digital cameras. Three quarters of those photo files can be retrieved in several ways (for example, by date) but the most useful design (and the most time-consuming to develop) is tracked by “keywords” that let me pull up all the “shorebird” photos as opposed to all the “raptors”, and so on. I’m still not able to pull together several photos of the purple finch if I say to the system “really raspberry-headed birds”. But give me time.
At last count I have, like too many of us, not only thousands of photos but about 20 hobbies. A tool like a photo album organizer lets me bring some order to at least two of my hobbies, photography and painting. There is hobby overlap because, for example, I keep track of watercolor and acrylic paintings by means of photographs. (To track paintings for sale and those that are sold I use a different photo organizing system that is linked to the others.) I don’t have any record of the oils I used to do since they grew up before digital photography obscured my view of the world.
About forty dollars bought me the COREL photo album. A solid competitor, though one with fewer features, is Picasa, a freebie from Google. After installation, both photo organizers mine your computer looking for image files by extension. Most of my photos and yours bear the “.jpg” suffix so that makes things easy. As a result, you can superficially organize your photos by date of creation as a computer file or, what is more useful, by the date when each was shot. Any serious camera, and many others that are merely jokes , will stamp the date when you took the photo and let that info be recovered by computer software. More cameras every day recognize the EXIF standard and store a subset of useful, relevant data inside each picture file.
Having offered all this, let me say that I’m disgruntled by the prospect of once again keying in the names and phrases that may organize my last four thousand photos. But living without this information now and in the future frightens me. I just spent half a day looking for a shorebird photo without calling on old Photo Album 5. The same photo (one of 285 I was told) popped up in about ten seconds when I went back to consult the older program and see what it remembered about my older (pre-COREL Photo Album 6) photos. So the advantages of a program like number 5 and 6, regardless of manufacturer is pretty obvious. But where I will find the time to key in all this data I do not know, unless I simply stop shooting new pictures for a month, an unlikely prospect. An old lesson from my youth as a data base manager may recommend not going back to re-load the old data of Number 5 in the newer system. I’ll let things stand where they are and begin to store newer photos in system Number 6.
It’s not the most favored method, living with two contrasting, incompatible systems. But it does let you continue to use the time and energy you put into the older system, and go on to a bright future using the newer. Until some yokel builds yet another incompatible but preferable system. God forbid.
For a side-by-side summary of available software in this area go to the following Web site: Photo Organizing Software Review 2008.
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