More on Photo Organisation

As I mentioned before, I have tried several different programs. ACDSee ran out of steam at around 4000 images, but Smartpix was much better. I had some issues with running it, but their technical support is excellent. I think that your emails are answered by one of the developers, so if there is a problem they really know what they're talking about and can actually fix it.
I'd rate it at about 4 out of 5, but that's based on an early version. I will download and try the current version and let you know how I fare.
Why use any of these products?
Photo managers allow you to attach tags (sometimes called keywords) to your images. You can then easily find all of the photos that have the tags you specify. In the wedding example I used last time, each photo could have the names of the bride and groom, venue, type of car, location and many more tags attached to it.
I just file my photos by year and month taken, selecting the appropriate tags allows me to find exactly the photos I need. It is also extremely useful if you want to sell your photographs as your customers can search on the tags.
Note that both of these programs keep the tags separate from the photos. They maintain databases, which link each photo to its tags. If you can try to ensure that the tags are also written to the jpeg, as this makes searching and posting photos on websites easier.

OK the shot is in the camera, what next?

When I bought my first digital camera I used to simply save photographs on my PC. That meant thinking of a name for each file leading to file names like Dover Castle 1, Dover Castle 2 etc.
I then spent some time inventing a way to organise the files. I chose to put them into separate folders for each subject, but this rapidly became a nightmare, because many pictures didn't fit neatly into one category.
Take for example a photo taken at a wedding. This might show friends, family, the venue, a limousine, wedding cake, champagne...
OK I could just have a folder for each wedding, but which one contains the picture of the white Rolls Royce?
Fortunately I then discovered ACDSee. This piece of software combines good photo editing and a database allowing you to add tags, or keywords, to your photos. These enable you to use several different words on each image.
Unfortunately my library of images grew too big for ACDSee to cope and their upgrade policy sucks, so I looked at other options.
Read the next post for details.