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General Discussion => General Chat => Topic started by: ArcziPL on May 04, 2019, 11:55:12 PM

Title: What photo manager do you recommend?
Post by: ArcziPL on May 04, 2019, 11:55:12 PM
Hello, I'd like to ask you for a recommendation of a photo management software. My photo collection is so far organized in directories, named by sortable date + keywords. Pretty neat and tidy but as it constantly grows since 2004, it became barely searchable and hardly possible to keep an overview.

Despite never using a photo manager, I think I have some ideas what I'd like to have. While setting up a new laptop for my grandmother, I checked what the included apps can do. Microsoft Photos from Windows 10 was an eye-opener here.

What the ideal program should be/can:

Nice to have details:

Too much? Ask Santa Claus or write yourself? It so, then I'll still happily hear about best what you can recommend.
Actually Microsoft Photos + tagging + rating + filtering would be already good enough. So it can't be that hard.

No editing options needed, have another tools for that. However, a nice simple full-screen browser would be nice. I use FastStone Viewer for that purpuse but I can imagine wanting to see all photos matching the filtering+sorting on a full screen.


I started looking for possibilities by checking which apps offer face recognition. Got a list, tried Fotobounce first. And it's such crap I can only imagine. Slow, screen-space-wasting, offers no better browsing options than just browsing my directory structure and face recognition is unusable. For face recognition they just simply compare 2D images, so only identical perspective, haircut, lighting conditions and so on lead to a match. There are much more advanced techniques already. Full 3D head projection, pose and expression neutralization... Microsoft Photos must use it.

Some background of my directory hierarchy: I split all photo sessions, holidays into separate directories named by a date (in a sortable form yyyy.mm.dd) + some tags. Inside I put a subdirectories: all RAWs, selected best shots in RAW, selected best shots postprocessed, selected best shots postprocessed for showing to others (without too private stuff or limited to let's say 100 shots of a holiday). Naming of these directories is always consistent. If needed I could move all final images to another location.

For viewing I use FastStone Image Viewer: fast, nice to browse through directory trees, awesome full-screen viewer. I believe I'll keep it anyway as standard browser for many cases. However, it has problems when switching from viewer to browser mode, while being inside a directory on a network drive. It hangs up or crashes often. It is also problematic to browse directories fast, as FastStone always load photos new to show thumbnails. This includes all subdirectories, also with RAW photos, which takes some time. Keeping the collection on a NAS makes it even worse. I like that it doesn't create any files inside directories but that's the price to pay.
Title: Re: What photo manager do you recommend?
Post by: AF-OFF on May 06, 2019, 05:03:57 PM
Remember using IrfanView back in the days. Nice and stable soft. seems to accept raw too
https://www.irfanview.com/main_formats.htm
good luck
Title: Re: What photo manager do you recommend?
Post by: ArcziPL on May 06, 2019, 10:23:21 PM
Thanks for your contribution. However, as far as I know, IrfanView is just an image viewer, without managing/organizing functions.

Another one I'm just evaluating is DigiKam. It is very well designed, usability is definitely it's strength. It also satisfies all my important requirements with the exception of face recognition, which is just bad. However, manual face tagging is made in a very smart way. I like how it's philosophy greatly matches to my already available folder hierarchy. Next strength: it's cross platform. I consider moving away from Windows if privacy will be further spoiled like it already is and possibility to keep the tool on another platform is pretty convincing.

Next one to check out will be ACDSee Photo Studio. Based on videos on Youtube looks promising. Quite pricey though.
Title: Re: What photo manager do you recommend?
Post by: scrax on May 07, 2019, 12:12:57 AM
Lightroom?

I'll stop using it soon or later and digikam seems the best alternative for me (i don't use face recognition a lot)

BTW: privacy and security is a problem on any internet connected PC with AMD/Intel processor made after 2008 (OS don't matter)
Title: Re: What photo manager do you recommend?
Post by: chris_overseas on May 07, 2019, 03:48:43 PM
Photo Mechanic might be worth a look though doesn't have any face recognition AFAIK. Also, Honeyview for image viewing.
Title: Re: What photo manager do you recommend?
Post by: ArcziPL on May 10, 2019, 09:30:40 PM
If anyone interested, I share some more impressions:

Picasa
Really good face recognition. It needs more user input than Microsoft Photos but the end result is also way better (more recognized faces). Amazing to see how the detection algorithm adapts decisions after every single user action. It's also great to have an option to just don't tag particular person. Just give this feedback and the tags for this person disappears. Great for some school photos or trips with people in the background I don't even know.
It offers tagging and so on but, typically to Google apps: they implement just one way of doing things and leave nearly no configurability. This I don't like a lot. Example: tags are always stored in metadata of JPEGs, so my automatic backups would explode.

ACDSee Studio
Also a very good face recognition. Beside that a lot of features, options, menus... A bit too much for my taste and important things are hidden. I was also not able to find e.g. multiple directory/file exclusion by masks. The statistics looked cool when shown on YouTube video but it's just a gadget. Can't really configure them. Also very bulky: it starts 3 processes. One main app, background indexer and something else, probably for synching with clouds? The last two stay on, even after you close the main program. Blah, don't like such stuff.


At the moment I tend to DigiKam, even despite the automatic face recognition doesn't really work. The rest ist just great.