Best Free Digital Photo Organizer

Another free digital photo organizer to consider - BonAView:
http://www.highmotionsoftware.com/products/bonaview

Phototheca — free photo organizing software makes it easy to view, sort and organize thousands and thousands of your photos. Tag your photos with keywords, put into albums, view on calendar and more:
http://lunarship.com/

Some features for the new editor to investigate and report on:

How automatic is red-eye identification? Can you just frame the eyes, or must you mark exactly the pupal and no surrounding area? If the entire eye-ball is selected, can red-eye change only the red, or does it slam everything in the selection to a neutral color? Is that color fixed, or is it sensitive to the adjacent non-red colors?

Tag to file name, and file name to tag. Can you make a selection based on both metadata and file info (or absence of info)? Can the program add metadata from file names, or rename/move pictures with metadata, like programs that handle audio (.mp3, .acc, .wma) files? (Look at mp3tag or others in the "Best Fr-- MP3 Tag Editor" list for examples.)

Can you select and rename pictures based on dates, file names, and tags? Dates can be really tricky. First there is a choice of file dates (create or modified), and then identical dates can vary by an hour or two (daylight saving time) or a by second or two (file synchronization), or because the camera internal date was wrong. Can date ranges be used? How about selecting pictures where the internal (exif) data matches or doesn't match the external date (file info)?

Existing collections. What help can it give for finding existing pictures on your computer and organizing, or reorganizing, them? What other programs is it aware of, previous used to organize pictures, which saved your collection in a database and/or copied your pictures into an internal archive. (Kodak Easyshare comes to mind...) Can it access web or cloud based photos like Google Documents, Picassa, or Windows Live?

Are there tools to help find duplicate photos? These might be similar because they were taken at the same time, or they maybe edited/cropped versions of the same photo. Or in existing collections, they may be duplicated by (inadvertent) copying while organizing, or by programs that "import" pictures from your hard disk into its own archive.

Database support. Does the program use a database, or does it always read each picture for the metadata? Does it keep a metadata cache, like thumbs.db caches thumbnails? (These questions affect performance.) Can the database be exported, or accessed by other programs like Office? If there is no database, can export like listings of picture data be created?

Cropping and re-sizing. Can a selection mark be set to/held at a fixed ratio like 1::1, 3::4, 9::16? Can it pick common dimensions like 1024x768 pixels, or 5"x7" (based on dpi)? How about reduction ratios like 50%? Can it automatically find some crop selections, such as a group of people in the middle of a picture?

Rotation and straightening assistance. Can the program suggest a rotation? How about a small rotation based on finding some long line in a picture like a horizon or building or stripe? How about a person? After straightening, can it automatically set up a crop to remove the blank picture area added by the rotation? Can you just mark two points, and the program automatically straightens to that line?

Color correction dialogs. Can it automatically suggest a new color balance? Can it show several examples of adjusted values, and let you choose what looks best? Can it repeat the process to help you zero in? Does it support the color/saturation model, or the brightness/contrast model, or both models? What about colors that can not be displayed (or display poorly like dark colors)?

Can you visually set the compression level for a jpeg, tiff, etc. by looking at (simultaneously displayed) before/after images? For any editing operation, can you see the existing image and the newly altered image at the same time?

What are the (practical) storage limits of the program? Is the a maximum number of pictures or folders? How deep can folders nest? How much disk space beyond that of the tracked images does it require? Can an archive be maintained that has multiple root folders and/or drives? What sort of remote storage does it support, such as "web folders", or files with network (UNC) names? Is there a limit to the amount of metadata it can work with?

I use IrfanView as a simple photo viewer and for cropping etc and PhotoShop for more significant "doctoring"; I'm happy with these programs for these purposes. What I'd really like (if this is the appropriate venue) is advice as to what I could use to link individual photos to either a database or text files with descriptions of the photo: I largely take bird photos and want to record, date, place and other info and be able to access this info directly from the photo. Any suggestions or suggestions for a more appropriate forum to post my query? Thanks in anticipation.

Bob

I have 4000 images that I have placed into 25 different folders. What I want to do is see all of the images from a particular folder visible on my screen and be able to drag any of the individual images over to another section of the screen so I can put the images in specific arrangements.

I do not need to edit the images because I have already done this in Adobe Photoshop. I just need to make collages on one side of my screen from a bunch of thumbnails shown on the other side of the screen.

Is there any software that will allow me to do this on a MAC?

Hi there,

Wow, thanks for that informative review, much appreciated.

I want an application that will help me with the following:

I have a folder with 2500 photos in it, a lot of these photos I want to delete and the rest I want to organise into about 8 folders. This is my only objective for an application ie. the best photo folder organiser which also makes it easy to delete the photos at the same time.

What do you recommend?

Cheers

yes! "FastStone Image Viewer" is the BEST!

Appreciative of the time spent gathering real-time real-life information about the several softwares discussed above.

My experiences do not cover all the reviewed softwares and eased my search.

The quality of the reviews indicate to me they were performed by somebody who knows what they are doing.

I believe I shall include a link to this page in an upcoming blog entry that is intended to assist those in seeking free or try-now-buy-the-full-version-later photo editing softwares.

No need to re-do what has already been done and obviously by somebody better qualified than me to make suggestions as to what is best in regards to photo editing softwares at the low-cost or free level.

as a dedicated image manager helicon photo safe is worthy contender
fully functional freeware
folder tree for easy excess of external drives
raw support
geo tagging
categories
optional dark interface
add your own choice of external apps for editing etc.

are a few of the features that appeal to me
you can check out the rest here

http://www.heliconsoft.com/safe.html

would appreciate a review of this software

You don't seem to mention IrfanView, (www.IrfanView.com) which used to be regarded as one of the best image viewers, and seems still to be actively developed

WARNING
windows live photo gallery 2011 degrades your images
each time you add a caption or tag
it resaves the image in a lossy format and the file size is reduced from the original
I advise you not to use this program with treasured original images

and I strongly recommend it to be removed from the list and a warning placed in the intro section

real nasty of microsoft for not fixing this issue

I want an organiser that will allow me to sort my scrapbooking .png and .jpg files into categories such as Christmas, snow, red, flowers, buttons, ribbons, etc, so that when I am making a scrapbook page I can easily find something like "red Christmas ribbons" or "square blue buttons" for example, then upload my choice from that category to my page. I don't need image editing or bells and whistles, the simpler the better for a technophobe like me!
What would you suggest?

DigiKam (now?) installs on windows from a single installer, making it no more difficult to install than any other program. http://sourceforge.net/projects/digikam/files/digikam/1.7.0/digiKam-installer-1.7-win32.exe/download

This I do not like "We would like to inform you that this port of digiKam under windows is not as stable as the linux version. DigiKam works mostly fine under windows, but some features are still broken due to some bugs in the underlying KDE libraries."

Thank you for your invariably helpful reviews. I use faststone but want a viewer which mimics a book (turning pages) I have seen your earlier review of digibook and agree, but it doesnt allow copying to disk. Suggestions would be very helpful after much trawling where "free" adverts turn out to be not free. Thanks

Hi, thanks for z very good summary of these programmes!

I'm looking for a photo organiser and wonder if you know any one that fist my needs:

I have a pretty good, albeit not yet perfect folder structure for my photos. Organised by photos\all\year\date-event. On an average photo session I take a few hundred shots. I'd like to keep all of these photos on my disc but only print/upload/send to iOS/android the really good ones. Hence I'd like a photo organiser that:
X) uses the current folder structure
X) can import new images from camera/sd card into folder structre
X) have the functionality to do easier image enhancements like the exposure/color of windows live photo gallery
Y) allows you to "tag" certain photos as "album photos", and then moves the tagged photos to photos\albums\year\date-event. This way I can use the photos\albums folder when I want to print the photos on paper or show them on my iPad, without removing any old pictures.
Z) sort through my current image collection and let me remove duplicates - sometimes the windows live photo "import all new photos" imports ALL photos in the memory card, so ive got heaps of duplicates all over the place!

Do you know of any software that includes all these x and y and z? If not, do you know any software that includes all theX? Or the the Y? Or the z?

The simplest way for X is obviously to just copy the "all" folder to the "albums" folder and then delete all the images that shouldn't be in it, but then I get duplicates when use windows live photo gallery to view the photos...

I prefer a program that uses the folder structure and the tag fields of the photos instead of some other database as this makes it more easy to move to another program in the future.

Thanks alot for any ideas!!
/anders

I am currently almost at the end of a long process of organising all my photos on my system. I have adopted the method of organising everything in folders on my system by date (a folder for every month), and adding keyword tags to the files.

Now I am wanting an organiser that I can now create albums by the tag I have assigned each photo. E.g. all holiday photos from my holiday in Sydney this year have the tag 'Sydney 2011' and I want all these photos in the same album.

Which of these would be the best at doing this? I do not need bells and whistles, this album creating by tag is my main priority. A nice looking interface wouldn't go amiss though!

I'm trying some of the candidates from this article and the Wikipedia article you reference. My comments:
- I'm a big fan of FastStone Image Viewer but can't see how this would do keywords. Can it? If so, does it keep these in a database or write to the image files themselves?
- Zoner seems very capable including keyword treatment and access to XMP and IPTC edits but it changes file modified date when I assign keywords; it must be writing them to the file itself; not sure I want that.
- Shutterfly Studio v1.7 is pretty impressive. It keeps a database of keywords and allows you to search for combinations of keywords and other attributes (such as folders and dates). There is a way to re-structure the keyword menu (by dragging within the tree structure to the left). The keywords can be written to the image files themselves as XMP without changing the file modified dates. I'm not sure yet whether it provides any access to IPTC fields. Still experimenting. No longer available from Shutterfly directly I guess. Downloaded from here and a few other sites found via search: http://www.shutterfly.com/downloads/install_st.jsp
I like it better than Picasa, Windows Live Photo Gallery, and Adobe Photoshop Album for a simple database tool.

[Moderator's note : Commercial software mention removed]