If you take a lot of digital photos, having a good photo management software program is important. No matter what your photography skill level is, you need a good system for categorizing your photos by date, location, subject, and tagging with relevant keywords. Once you’ve organized your photos, you’ll be able to find the image or images you need with a few keystrokes.
There are some excellent photo cataloging, processing, and editing software programs that will streamline your workflow. Top-rated products include ACDSee Pro and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Both are ideal for serious photo enthusiasts who need software that can help them manage their workflow and catalog and process an ever-growing image collection.
There are also products like Photoshop Elements and ACDSee Photo Manager that are well-suited for those who want to catalog their images and edit and share them but do not need the advanced features found in Lightroom or ACDSee Pro. They’re also great for folks who are interested in creative projects such as scrapbooks, photo books and calendars, photo greeting cards, slide shows, and more.
Recommendations for Serious Photo Enthusiasts
ACDSee Pro is renowned as an excellent DAM (digital asset management) software. It’s perfect for serious enthusiasts who have a lot of photos to catalog and process. It offers non-destructive editing of RAW and JPEG files and it makes asset management easy; its tabbed interface follows a typical workflow: Manage, View, Process, and Online. You can organize your photos by date, keyword, location data facial recognition, rating, category, and color label. This gives you numerous ways to search, sort, and share your images. Learn more at ACDSee.
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic is another great choice for professionals and serious photo enthusiasts. It streamlines your workflow and will make the importing, organizing, and processing of digital photo collections a breeze. Plus it offers excellent RAW format support and nondestructive editing. Lightrooms enables you to organize and tag your images with keywords, GPS location, star rating, flag, and color label. You can browse your photo library by setting filters and applying keywords and presets as you import your photos, which is a real time-saver. I really like to drag and drop my images into Collections, such as “beach photos.” Collections are virtual, meaning the actual photos stay in their original file locations, and you can have the same image in multiple collections. Learn more at Adobe
Skylum Luminar 4 – Luminar is fast becoming a rival to Lightroom Classic because of its image management library, RAW processing, and its wide array of editing tools and filters. Like Lightroom, Luminar also uses a library to browse, rate, and sort your images. Unlike Lightroom, Luminar has layers in its photo editing. Luminar is an application and plugin for Mac and PC. Learn more about Luminar here.
Novice to Intermediate Photo Enthusiast
Adobe Photoshop Elements is a great choice for the person who wants a combination of easy image management, excellent photo editing tools, and creative photo projects like video slideshows and photo gifts. Adobe uses its Adobe Sensei artificial intelligence to automatically curate photos based on quality, facial ID, and subjects. It uses smart tags that are automatically applied to your photos, such as dogs, birthdays, beaches, and more. You can view and sort images by date, subject, place, people, events, and other criteria. Unlike Photoshop, which is priced on a monthly subscription plan, Photoshop Elements is a standalone product for about $99. Go to Adobe.
ACDSee Photo Studio Home is another great option for amateur photographers. It features face detection and recognition, you can add ratings, hierarchical keywords, categories, and location data. There’s an image basket that you can use to gather images from across your hard drive, it will find duplicates and you can convert files in batches. In addition to photo management, ACDSee has a large toolkit of filters, you can brush on special effects, correct flaws and red-eye, plus improve blurriness, noise, and clarity. You can either make a one-time purchase or opt for a subscription plan that includes 4 ACDSee products. Learn more at ACDSee.
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