Any serious snapper will be able to tell you that keeping track of their exponentially growing collection of shots is a nightmarish task. As a pro photographer I am constantly filling hard drives and DVDs with images, many of which I know I will never need but none of which I can bring myself to cast into the digital dustbin. You wouldn't throw away negatives, so why should you delete your digital frames?
The downside of this rapidly increasing volume of files is, of course, the task of organising them. A number of software manufacturers have tried to develop solutions, but many are aimed at low-end users with few technical requirements. Here, we are going to look at some of the possibilities at the “prosumer” level.
First up in any photo software roundup must surely be the offering from Adobe. Photoshop Album Starter Edition 3.0 (£69.33) is closely associated with their Photoshop Elements package, a scaled down version of the industry-leading editing software. The interface is aesthetically very similar to Elements, with Mac-like bevelled buttons and curved lines. On first starting up the package you are asked to import photos from your hard drive, or from a camera or scanner. Having done this, you are presented with thumbnails of your images in the main panel on the screen. Above this is a timeline with a bar that you can drag in order to change the photos you are seeing, depending on when they were taken. This is great for people who don't take many photos, but the fact that you can only 'zoom in' to a period of months, rather than days or hours, renders the gimmick rather useless for the photo enthusiast.
Album contains lots of inventive gimmicks some of these are useful ideas but some are a little silly and will probably be of little interest to the serious photographer. You can tag photos, (a la Flickr), but why would we need a new system when the EXIF-based keywording available in Album's big brother, Adobe Bridge, was so good? Similarly, the ability to make a slide-show of your pictures is all very well, but most people who are serious about photography would probably rather have seen a suite of edit tools which went slightly further than the auto fix tools which Album offers.
Next up is Photool's IMatch ($59.95, about £30). From the moment you open the software it is clear this is a heavy-weight piece of kit. On first load it looks fairly intimidating - lots of grey and no pretty Adobe buttons. But in fact, IMatch uses an ingenious system to create an excellent user experience, if you are willing to give it some time.
IMatch is clearly built with the pro user in mind. It organises your images by creating a new database file made up of links to the relevant files on your computer. You can then assign different user-defined properties to the images, and sort them based on any of these properties. The best way to think of IMatch is not necessarily as photo management software, but as a powerful tool for building databases into which you just happen to be putting images, rather than numbers.
One of IMatch's most exciting features is its scripting environment. Here you can write your own macros enabling you to batch-process your images. The software comes with a huge number of macros (which you will know as Actions if you have ever used Photoshop) pre-installed, but the freedom to write any possible combination of commands for the software is very liberating.
If you are put off by IMatch's slightly scary interface, and its use of words like 'schema' and 'XMP cache', then you may find a happy medium in iView Media Pro (£129). iView's interface is a cross between Adobe Album and IMatch, with a basic toolbar running across the top of the screen, and 'cataloguing' fields down the left-hand side. The main area is taken up by what Album calls the Photo Well, into which you can drag and drop images from Windows Explorer. In iView you can also choose whether you want a thumbnail or list view here and, when you double-click an object you are given a larger preview.
iView boasts all of the features you would expect from photo management software of this kind - user-defined keywording, macro scripts, e-mail integration and, presumably in a sop to their lower-end market, the dreaded slide-show button. You can also find some clever extras such as the ability to add voice notes to images, or assign colour-coded labels. The latter function is particularly useful if you are sorting through large numbers of shots and want to quickly mark the keepers.
However, the real power of iView can be found in its image editor. Once you have an individual image selected, you can then load a new window which gives you a list of filters. Here you can do the regular, Album-esque jobs like red eye removal or auto enhancement. But, and here's the clincher, you also have access to a good selection of 'proper' editing functions. You can, for example, manually adjust levels and colour balance, adjust the saturation and convert your image to duotone. Each of these commands opens up another new window with some sliders and a smaller preview of your image, giving you a good degree of control over how your shot is looking. Anyone who is familiar with Photoshop will instantly feel at home with these functions, which confer a far more professional feel upon iView than Album achieves.
So far we have done a fairly good job of ignoring the elephant in the room - Google's Picasa. This software has been extraordinarily successful, perhaps in good part due to its association with the ubiquitous search engine. It is obviously built with the basic user in mind, with the intention of being as accessible as possible. However, when it comes to actually using Picasa it is impossible to escape the feeling that its developers have gone for style over substance on almost every level. When you run the latest version, Picasa 2, for the first time, the software automatically begins cataloguing all of the photos on your hard drive. It then displays small previews in the main area of the screen, along with a file tree on the left-hand side showing each of the groups of images it has found. Picasa automatically sorts by date, which is a good start. However, when I ran its automatic search it inexplicably split my files between one heading called 'Folders on Disk' and another called 'Other Stuff'. I found its unpredictable sorting methods both confusing and irritating.
Picasa is clearly designed for the web-enabled user. Shortcut buttons allow you to blog about the images in your catalogues, or order prints directly from your desktop. When it comes to image editing, however, the software soon shows its limitations. There is a list of 'Basic Fixes' such as red eye reduction and an 'I'm Feeling Lucky' button, which is a Google-fied auto fix function. However, this is about as far as you can delve. Certainly there are some pre-set effects, but I would personally like to see at least a “Levels” function. No such luck - highlights and shadows is about as good as it gets.
From the point of view of the semi-pro, good photo management software is hard to find. Most of the competitors in the field offer only very basic functions as far as image editing goes, instead focussing on trying to emulate a photo album in digital form. This is all well and good if you are just looking to take the odd holiday snap. However, for people who are serious about their photography the limitations of software such as Adobe Album and Picasa will become glaringly obvious almost immediately.
There are only two real alternatives for the serious user in this field. If you are looking to index a large number of images, or need to have particularly good control over your keywording system, then IMatch is almost certainly the package for you. The sheer breadth of customisable elements is enough to satisfy the vast majority of users, and its scripting environment is a welcome extra. IMatch does, however, lack the excellent suite of image editing tools which are to be found in iView. The fact that this piece of software feels a lot like an Adobe creation, can only be a good thing. Its image manipulation functions won't be matched without buying a full package such as Photoshop Elements.
Links
Photoshop Album - www.adobe.com/products/photoshopalbum/
IMatch - www.photools.com/
iView Media Pro - www.iview-multimedia.com/mediapro/ - *Our Review*
Picasa - picasa.google.com//
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