I think I must have tried just about every photo manager available on the web. The list is long… too long. Picasa, Corel, Adobe Lightroom, and a zillion others. Why? Because, like many missionaries, I now have something like 30,000 images from the past three+ decades of work and travel. And I’m constantly wishing I could illustrate a particular article with “just the right picture” — and I can never find the picture I want. The good news is — this is not an attempt to make money be referring you to a product that is going to offer us a kickback here at Brigada. (We’re through with that, by the way. I have become more and more convinced that it’s too big of a temptation to pad funding.) By contrast, you won’t find any “click-through” links that result in ad income or “affiliate marketing” for any one product. What I CAN tell you is — save your money please. Don’t conclude that you have to buy Lightroom to effectively track all those photos. To me, the clear and simple winner is a long-term competitor called ACDSee Pro 8. Find it at …
http://www.acdsee.com/en/products/acdsee-pro-8
You can own it today for $69.95. Why will you like it better than any other photo manager on the web? Simple:
a) It’s fast
b) It’s easy
c) It works
I’m convinced you can use it to tag photos then find them faster than anything else out there — and nobody is paying me to say that. In fact, once you find them, you might also come to think that ACDSee is just as effective at EDITING them, but I’ll leave that to the pro photographers to debate. What I AM qualified to tell you is that you will not find another product that finds them faster or more effectively than ACDSee. Try it for free to see if you agree.
Great to see that ACDSee is still around after all these years. Honestly it has been more than a decade since I last used it, but I remember it was fast all the way back then. I may have to give this a shot again.
Just FYI, if your main need is image organization & management – being able to find an image fast – the cheaper ACDSee 18 might be fine for you. The Pro 8 version adds some additional features, mainly on the editing side. And for more robust editing (though likely not nearly as powerful as Photoshop), get Ultimate. Here’s a handy PDF that compares these versions: http://res.acdsystems.com/product-kits/en/acdsee-ultimate-8/Ultimate8vs18-CChart03.pdf