Article

Free Organising Software

Most of the software mentioned here not only has the facilities to allow you to organise, index and find your images, but also usually has the facilities to allow you to view, carry out minor fixes and corrections and share via album uploads, the ability to email with photo attachments or linking to systems where you can order prints, photo books and more online.

The following are some which are available to download and use for FREE.

Picasa - has a tools suite which allows you to to manage and organize your digital images. It offers one simple place to organize, edit, create and share your pictures. After installing, the software can automatically scan your computer and drives for images and intelligently sort them into photo albums, ready for you to customize and organize. It offers different interface layouts and ways to view your pictures, including slideshow and a timeline feature. It supports import from twain devices, including digital cameras, photo emailing, printing and much more. With it's latest version, Picasa 3, it has three new features, the first is it links to Picasa Web Albums, which allows you to upload free image galleries, hosted by Google. You can also  'Sync' the images so that when you make a change using Picasa on your computer version it is automatically re-uploaded to the relevant online album.  There is also a new Photo Viewer which allows you to view the images through Windows Explorer without having to fully open the Picasa 3 program.  It will also instantly take and import screen and webcam captures. Homepage: To Find Out More or Download a copy Click Here.

Adobe Photoshop Album (Starter Edition) allows you to manage, edit and organize. The latest Starter Edition is version 3.2 and has some limitations, but provides overall management, as well as tagging (drag/drop categories for your images) which allows you to quickly filter your collection by assigned tags, cropping, colour corrections, fix red eye, brightness and more. You can also navigate with a timeline and create PDF slideshows from selected images. More Album Start Info here.

MyPhotoIndex -  focuses on image tagging and cataloguing and offers a clear & simple user friendly interface. The feature list is limited in order to maintain an easy to use photo cataloguing application. It  handles major file types as well as Avi clips and can read and convert RAW image formats. It can also help you hide private images from prying eyes, and lets you share your images with others. Its tagging and search facility allows unlimited number of tags or nesting levels. It is also able to import from local, network or removable drives and has a rating and sorting system to allow it to find images quickly. Myphotoindex Info Here

StudioLine Photo Basic - an image management solution that can import your photos directly from your digital camera, scanner or your hard drive and organize them in a database that allows you to assign personal keywords, descriptions and categories. The program also includes a variety of editing tools to remove red-eye, correct exposure, adjust colors, crop images and more. Other features include export to HTML gallery, send optimized images via email, image backup, EXIF/IPTC support and more. Some of these features may not be in the Free version, but may require an upgrade to the Photo Classic version which does do all this and more. Click here to find out more.

imgSeek - free photo collection database, that allows you to manage your photo collection. It indexes all your specified image folders, along with metadata and EXIF information, and allows you to perform custom queries to search your images. In addition to keyword queries, it offers an image content search that allows you to input an image, or even draw a sketch, to find images that match the criteria. You can organize images into groups, perform batch operations, create HTML galleries, find duplicate images and more. This piece of software is Open Source software and offers many interesting features, however because of this it is not well documented and some have reported it dosen't always fully function in some aspects.  See here for more details

Fotana allows you to organize and share your photos in albums that can be exported as HTML pages or a standalone EXE file. It allows you to freely arrange and size pictures, using single or multiple photos on a page. Additional features include minor image enhancements like rotation, saturation, brightness and contrast adjustments. You can resize or crop images by simply dragging the edges until they meet the desired proportions. The albums can be exported as standalone EXE viewer or a simple HTML thumbnail gallery. Uses JPG images only.  Click Here.

DigiBookShelf enables you to display and manage photos in a virtual album, using a virtual bookshelf interface. The photos are displayed as thumbnails and you can add text and sound comments to each image. When you click on a thumbnail, you can view the image in actual size. It's interface uses simple drag and drop to create new albums. It can be used like a real-life photo album, complete with flipping pages that are enhanced with sound effects. You can customize the look of your photo album collection, select from different page layouts, design the look and feel of each album, import from your memory card and more. There are also commercial version available with additional features.  More Info Here

Album Burger is a free digital photo album that enables you to organize your images into virtual albums. You can import images from selections or folders, choose from various page layouts, add captions, comments, classify and identify images and other information, and also search for images by keyword. You can re-arrange images by drag and drop, add background art, print album pages and more. The program includes an image editor for basic image adjustments, cropping and filter effects, as well as a slideshow viewer and an option to export your album(s) as a HTML gallery. It imports all album photos into its database, which means that you will have two copies of your photos - one in the original location, and the imported version in the Album Burger database. Click here to visit it's home page.

The following item isn't really an organiser but a piece of software that allows you to mark up individual items within the picture, and only works with JPG images. However it does seem to have an ability to allow you to find photos uses these tags as well as having other useful facilities.

FotoTagger lets you easily add movable notes to individual elements visualized on jpg images, that can be viewed from within it's own viewer, but are invisible in any other viewer. The notes can be hidden in a click of a button so the original view remains intact. Moreover, the notes always stay with the image wherever it is shared. The tags do not modify the image data, but use the comment space that is provided with the JPG format, therefore your original images remain visually unchanged. If you want your comment tags to be visible to all others, you can save a merged copy of the image, which permanently inserts the tag(s) into the photo. The program also integrates with Blogger and Flickr and can upload a merged copy of a tagged image to your blog, or send it by email. It includes a search engine that indexes the comment tags in your images, and allows you to instantly find a photo based on the embedded keywords or comment, create animated GIF's and organise images. You can edit single or multiple images from the right-click menu in Windows Explorer.  See here for details.

See Also:

Organising and Indexing Your Images

Keywords and Captions

Metadata

Flags and Filters

Backing up your photo collections

External Hard Drives

Geotagging