Sign in with
Sign up | Sign in

Best Free Photo Management Tools

Best Free Photo Management Tools
By
Best Free Photo Management Software

The advent of digital photography has made capturing images of the world around us easier than ever. It's also resulted in a massive increase in the amount of pictures we have to manage. It's not unusual to have hundreds or even thousands of photos scattered across poorly labeled folders and a half-dozen different devices. Organizing them all can be a Sisyphean task, with new photos coming in even as you file your current collection of images into a systematic whole. Here are a few free apps and trial tools for organizing, editing, and browsing. We hope they will help you on your way to a neat and well organized photo collection.

See more See less
There are 10 Comments.
Other Comments
  • 0
    EDVINASM , September 24, 2012 9:48 PM
    I have found that My Own File Manager does the best job :-)
  • 0
    Onus , September 24, 2012 10:01 PM
    The best photo browsing software I think I ever used was something called "Firehand Ember." Editing was limited, but it could do format conversions, and add text, arrows, and other drawing elements onto an image. This made it great for preparing documentation from screen shots.
  • 0
    kelemvor33 , September 24, 2012 10:45 PM
    No mention of Windows Live Photo Gallery? Or is that just because it's made by Microsoft? Support editing, tagging, syncing, uploading, etc.
  • 1
    anonymous@guest , September 25, 2012 1:22 AM
    Also no mention of "Gallery" (http://gallery.menalto.com/). How many people take pictures solely for themselves? Don't most do so with the intention to share them with others... so why not manage, organize, tag, describe, and share all in one step? I was hoping to see what othere people were using instead of Gallery.
  • 0
    anonymous@guest , September 25, 2012 9:34 PM
    I use Picasa to import images from my camera card into c:\DCIM\Date\*.*

    Then I use Picasa to expand the directory name to C:\DCIM\MyName Date Count Camera Location Description\*.*

    Then I use free 1-4a.com (one for all) Rename for basic group renaming, taking a series of picture files like "PICT1234.Raw PICT1235.Raw ..." and so on to "myname-date-1234.Raw myname-date-1235.Raw ..." for a whole directory.

    Then I have an all-purpose, well-identified library for all time that any program, especially Windows Explorer, can access and browse, and backups are easy, smartly adding only new files to external USB drive archive similarly organized for all time -- hey, it's all library science, right?

    Unlike free Google Picasa, free Windows Live Photo Gallery makes copies of any image touched and moves and renames the original out of the user's access. Picasa makes modifications as a script, leaving the original image file unscathed, and when exporting a copy, leaves the "master" in the same folder tree where it always was, making drag and drop backups and restoring easy and reliable.

    Along with Picasa -- great for printing -- I also use free IrfanView for many tasks, like resizing, cropping, cutting and pasting into combination pictures, lossless JPG rotation and cropping, and batch tasks, including renaming, and filtering to black-and-white copies.

  • -1
    anonymous@guest , September 25, 2012 10:40 PM
    How about IrfanView... its free, and do a lot more than some presented here.
  • -1
    miomir , September 27, 2012 8:47 PM
    Strange that you don't mention Windows Photo Gallery 2012 which does a great job and Picasa comes first in your review...
  • -1
    miomir , September 27, 2012 8:48 PM
    Strange that you don't mention Windows Photo Gallery 2012 which does a great job and Picasa comes first in your review...
  • 1
    adlerrot , September 28, 2012 7:57 AM
    Another free and useful viewer is "irfanview" It has been around a long time. Very good at batch processing file names and sizes. Very fast and easy to use. Can re-size and change types. Does some editing but very rudimentary. Takes up very little overhead.
  • 0
    anonymous@guest , February 15, 2013 9:06 PM
    John, thanks for your review, but you didn't mention Daminion - a new, powerful and free photo manager with multi-user support. The benefits of Daminion are:
    - Daminion can automatic sync tags with XMP metadata
    - Relative paths in catalogs that allows you to easily port your photo archive library to another computer
    - Server version with True Multi-user access
    - 100+ formats supports including Photo, Camera RAW images, video, audio, Office, Vector, and CAD formats
    - Version Control
    - Hierarchical Tags
    - Multiple catalogs
    - Advanced, Quick and Saved Searches

    And at least but not last Daminion is free, unlike ACDSee, Lightroom, Apperture...
Tom’s guide in the world
  • Germany
  • France
  • Italy
  • Ireland
  • UK
Follow Tom’s guide
Subscribe to our newsletter