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If you’re reading this, I’m going to assume you own or are about to purchase a digital camera. We have five, including 2 Sony Ericsson phone cameras, a Canon S110 (2 megapixel), and a new HP 945xi (5 megapixel), and my original Kodak DC3200 (1 megapixel). I bought the Kodak a little more than 3 years ago before my first daughter was born. It was downhill from there. It’s been three years, we’ve had another girl, and we now have a collection of more than 6,000 photos (the actual total is around 8,000 images, including pictures from family and friends). We’re actively using 4 of the cameras, and pictures continue to be taken. Now we need a way to enjoy them. Managing this many images is a part-time job at some companies. I hate the software that typically comes for free with products, and also wanted to have copies of the photos on a Windows 2000 computer and on my Macintosh Powerbook, so I needed to find two solutions for managing our quickly growing collection. I know there are dozens of photo
organizers out there, but I wanted to pick the best on each platform
for home use. I’ve used a wide variety of image management
programs over the years, including Cumulus, ThumbsPlus, ACDSee,
HiJaak Pro (I worked for them), and many others.
I installed Adobe Album on a Pentium 900 computer with 128mb of RAM. I was easily able to import the 6,000 images, but it did take a while. Trying to use the program with the required RAM (they recommend 256mb) was impossible--it took forever to do anything. I added 256mb for a total of 384mb and the program was reasonably fast. Adobe Album ($49) has many nice features, but the calendar-based organization is one feature I’d like to see in iPhoto. You can literally look at a calendar onscreen and see when you took photos. I looked at January last year, when my second daughter was born, and was quickly able to see slideshows of her first days. They also have an excellent timeline view. Our other requirements were to be able to print photo calendars on our color inkjet printer, and watch them on TV. I was quickly able to put a VCD (most DVD players will play Video CD’s) with our photos in a slideshow together, and burn it from within the software. We also setup a slideshow to show all 6,000 at a recent party for my oldest daughter, and people enjoyed seeing the changes in the kids over time. On the Mac I use Apple’s iPhoto. I have been using iPhoto for more than a year, and it’s a great program. However, it was getting really slow trying to handle 6,000 photos. I just got the new version, part of Apple’s iLife 04 product ($49). It’s a lot faster, and is fun to use again. iPhoto has an interesting feature that enables you to share photos in your house. It uses Apple’s Rendezvous technology so you can let other Mac users view your albums. They also have the same ability to share music in iTunes. Apple’s iLife program also includes the music program Garage Band (awesome), iMovie, iTunes (free download, but included), and iDVD. Both programs have the ability to print photos on your color inkjet printer, crop and enhance your images, order prints online, create a Web page, create custom slideshows, and even order a high-quality photo book. Another important feature in both is the ability to archive your images (please back up your photos!). You can see why I picked these two due to their similar abilities. I would highly recommend both programs for managing your images. They both cost under $50 and are worth it for the ease of use and power they both offer. I remember when I first created a slideshow on iPhoto, complete with soft music, and showed my wife our photos of our kids. She cried — definitely worth $50. If you have an older Windows machine, you might want to consider CompuPic Pro, which has lower system requirements than Adobe Album, yet has a lot of interesting features. I would recommend a recent Mac or Windows computer if you’re going to manage a large image library, and a lot of hard disk space to hold them (5mb files, even compressed, take up a lot of space). |
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To solve the problem
under Windows I narrowed my selection to