So wait, you’re asking yourself, why would that make me trust you about photo management, Thomas? Simple: my need for the best photo management software is the same as yours, and the winner for large collection management is what I’m now using for my personal photos. I would randomly tag things in Lightroom, but it could hardly be called organized. Nature photographs are mixed in with landscapes and experiments, and occasionally a memory card dump would include some work images mixed in. I organized my images based roughly on the time they were photographed, but that was the extent of it. I’ve worked as a professional product photographer in addition to my own personal photography practice, and I have to admit that before I finished these reviews, my personal photo collection was a mess. Hi, my name is Thomas Boldt, and I’m an avid photographer. The interfaces take a bit of time to get used to, and are not nearly as capable as ACDSee, but they can still help you bring order to the chaos of an unsorted “Photos” folder. They provide more basic flagging and filtering of your collection, but you can’t argue with the price. If you’re a casual photographer looking for a great photo manager on a budget, you may want to look at the free alternatives I tested. I’m going to be using it for my personal collection moving forwards, and I refuse to compromise on quality when it comes to the software I choose. It even provides statistics about the images you’ve got in your collection, and we all love Big Data.

It has a solid set of filters and tags, it’s easy to use, and it’s quite responsive when handling photo collections with tens of thousands of high-resolution images. So what’s a photographer to do?Īfter some careful testing using my own roughly-organized photo collection, I’ve selected ACDSee Photo Studio as the best photo management program, no matter whether you’ve got a few images to sort through or thousands. Your computer’s operating system may include a very basic tool for organizing your images, such as the macOS Photos app, but it’s often hard for a simple program to keep up with the incredible number of images created in the modern world. If you love your smartphone or digital camera, you’re probably taking hundreds of photos all by yourself each year, and if you’re a professional photographer that photo collection will grow even faster.Īs a result, many photographers find themselves stuck with a huge number of images and no good way to sort through them. Instagram alone is responsible for roughly 95 million photos a day, and that doesn’t count all the images that are sent to different services, shot with DSLRs, or never uploaded.

Every day, the world takes an incalculable number of photos.

Can you make slideshow in fotostation