Best Free Photo Management Tools

I have found that My Own File Manager does the best job :-)

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.

No mention of Windows Live Photo Gallery? Or is that just because it's made by Microsoft? Support editing, tagging, syncing, uploading, etc.

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.

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.

How about IrfanView... its free, and do a lot more than some presented here.

Strange that you don't mention Windows Photo Gallery 2012 which does a great job and Picasa comes first in your review...

Strange that you don't mention Windows Photo Gallery 2012 which does a great job and Picasa comes first in your review...

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.

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...