Three great tools for managing your photos, and one is FREE!

Mar 16, 2009 by Matt Voran

“I really need to get my pictures organized”

“I have GOT to back-up my pictures, THEY ARE MY LIFE!”

“I HATE the program that came with my camera, its so hard to get the pictures off!”

“I wish I knew how to use Photoshop
so I could make this picture a little lighter.”

These are some things I hear a lot from friends, family and co-workers, and I bet at least two of these apply to almost everyone.   The truth of the matter is that achieving all of these things is simple with the right tools and knowledge.

Now I know that personally, getting organized is a real challenge, but my first guest makes it soooo much easier and fun!  Let me introduce Picasa.

Picasa

Picasa is my favorite free tool for importing, organizing, editing, viewing and even sharing photos.  A free program from Google, Picasa is surprisingly powerful and is a great answer to all of the questions posed at the beginning of this article. First of all, Picasa has a great tool for importing photos from your camera, that not only shows you previews of the pictures that on are it (as long as they are not RAW format, but if your shooting RAW there are better options, see #2) but also automatically detects duplicates, so you don’t end up importing the same shots over and over if you like me and you leave the card full until its….full.  Once you get the images in, its a very powerful organizational tool, everything you move or group in Picasa, is mirrored on your hard drive and vice-versa.  Picasa will even monitor folders (such as “My Pictures”) on your computer and automatically add them to your library!   Editing is super easy with a large variety of presets to choose from, including and “I’m Feeling Lucky” button which basically just makes the picture look better automatically.  We use this program at my house to organize family photos and I absolutely LOVE it.  the best features by far are for sharing those photos.  Picasa is directly linked to Google’s own photo sharing site, Picasa Web.  Basically, if you sign up for a gmail account (you don’t HAVE to use the email, but I suggest you do anyway because gmail is fantastic) you get free web space where you can post your pictures into albums and then share the link with friends and family.  Its easier than trying to shrink down photos for email etc.   Although if you really want to email the pictures, Picasa makes that easy as well.  Its a simple as selecting the pictures you want to send and clicking a button, although it works best if you use Outlook or Outlook Express, or have a gmail account.  Oh yeah, and it has a nifty backup feature too, that lets you backup your treasures onto disc for storage, might I recommend a fire proof safe for that?

Adobe Bridge

Adobe Bridge is packaged with Adobe Creative Suite, so many of you may already have this, but if you don’t Amazon has some good deals.
Bridge is meant to be..well, a bridge! It spans the gap between all of the programs in the Adobe Creative Suite. Now most of us photo editors care only about Photoshop and maybe Illustrator for the more advanced effects. That said, you might say well then I don’t need Bridge but I am here to tell you that I use Bridge on a daily basis as a standalone program! Its great for importing photos off the camera because you can see thumbnails of RAW images! Which really no other software will do except for the typically buggy and sluggish software packaged with cameras. Nikon’s version of this is decent though, and free. Another great feature of Bridge is its scripting ability. You can run many of the ever so important and useful image processing functions in Photoshop directly from Bridge! There are also some great automatic develop settings for processing your RAW images if you have a particular style, as many of us do. From an organization standpoint, Bridge functions in the same way as windows explorer or a typical file folder viewer, with one important advantage. THUMBNAILS! Bridge will show you thumbnails of almost ANY file format, especially the ones created by Adobe products. You .PSD, .TIFF, .AI .PDF and RAW files will all show and you can make them HUGE so browsing your library is super easy. I also really love the rating, labeling and tagging abilities, which make finding specific files a breeze. More on that in another post though.

Adobe Lightroom

If you are looking for a more advanced “developing” solution for processing  RAW images, look no further than Adobe Lightroom.
Lightroom really lets you treat your digital negatives as exactly that, negatives. The features here are too extensive here to go into fully, but just know that this program can pretty much replace Photoshop when it comes to adjusting an image, and leaves Photoshop to do the more advanced techniques to drastically alter a photo. Lightroom even has some nice printing functionality. This is as close as you will get to a digital dark-room. Take a look a good look at this Adobe tour, I recommend this software to anyone who just wants to take pictures in RAW format, catalog them, and develop them with some of the most advanced digital effects and adjustments ever. And its way cheaper than Photoshop, so if you don’t plan on giving people two heads or doing things like whitening teeth or changing the color of hair etc, then just get Lightroom!

The Bottom Line

Picasa is the all-in-wonder for the beginner or even intermediate looking for simple and to the point, with an emphasis on sharing and easy viewing of their photos. Some intermediate users and definitely advanced users will want to move on to some combination of Adobe software. Did I mention that its FREE!?

Adobe Bridge and Photoshop combo. This is definitely the most flexible of the three solutions, as Bridge plays well with RAW files, as well as native formats from all other adobe products which may get placed into your work flow if you plan on getting into more advanced projects that are closer to digital art than photography. Its a great place to start though as it will grow with you no matter what your end goal is.

Lightroom is definitely the most focused solution and is squarely aimed at the digital photographer as its meant to replace the darkroom that so many of those from the film era have been missing so much. If you want to take pictures and simply get them processed beautifully with more control than you ever imagined, this is your answer. And its way cheaper than buying the Adobe Creative Suite, which for most is overkill.

That is all I have right now folks, I hope you enjoyed this article. Let the comments flow, I want to know what you think!