There are many digital photography software programs today that help you organize your digital pictures. Some are called image viewers while others are called digital asset management programs. They can be free of charge or can cost hundreds of dollars to buy. How can one make sense of all these options? It is actually pretty simple because there are essentially three categories of image management programs. Read on to find out what they are.
What is digital photography software?
Let me start by saying that digital photography software in its broadest sense can be broken down in two large categories. One large category of digital photography software is image creation and editing software. This category contains software programs like: Gimp, Adobe Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro. The focus here is to create images or greatly alter existing images.
Do you understand how to manage your digital pictures?
On the other hand, you have digital photography software that help you manage and edit your existing photo collection. While this category of digital photography software programs can have great image editing capabilities, the focus of these programs is on managing your photo collection.
It is this second category of digital photography software that I want to explore more in this article.
First category: Digital photography software that is simple and fast.
These are the simplest digital photography software programs, sometimes called image viewers. They provide a direct view of the image folders you have on your hard drive. Image viewers allow you to quickly view and manipulate your digital photo folders and files. Some, more sophisticated image viewers give you basic image editing tools such as: brightness and contrast, saturation, color levels and other simple tools.
In addition, these image viewers assist you with transferring pictures from your digital camera to your computer. This feature is extremely useful if you want to rename your image files during the transfer and create specific folders based on values in the EXIF metadata portion of your image files. For example, you can quickly rename your image files based on the date when the picture was taken and you can also create a sub folder for each date when you took the pictures on your camera. All these transformations can be done while transferring the pictures.
The main advantage is speed. They are supposed to be fast to load and fast to navigate through your pictures.
The main disadvantage is the lack of image metadata management capability. They can provide EXIF information but that’s about it. They don’t usually provide any access to IPTC and XMP metadata elements.
The best example of this class is FastStone Image Viewer which is still free for personal use. This is my favorite image viewer and I use it quite extensively for transferring my pictures and doing quick edits and manipulation of images. Nothing fancy here, just fast and easy to use.
Next page: Image metadata enabled image viewers.
- There is one big difference between image viewers and DAM software
- How to choose the perfect digital photography software
- What makes photo management software tick?
- The road frequently traveled by image metadata
- Understand and manage your image metadata
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