Understand all digital photography software programs.

Category: Software Review ; Topics: • • • • •

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.

Start learning now: Download my "BIG" book.     Download my Picasa book.

Second category: Digital photography software programs that are image metadata enabled

While the image viewers in the first category provide only EXIF image metadata information, this new category of image viewers provide more access to image metadata. The access to metadata is not only to view it but also to create new image metadata and edit existing metadata. I am referring of course to IPTC image metadata and XMP image metadata. This is particularly helpful when adding keywords (tags) to your pictures as well as other authoring information like: author, caption and location.

I would like to point out that image metadata access for this class of programs is provided only when needed. If I don’t request to see image metadata or edit it, then the program doesn’t do anything. This way the software is supposed to be very responsive to navigation through image folders.

One advantage that comes with having access to image metadata, is vastly improved search capabilities. This class of image viewers allow the user to not only edit image metadata, but also search pictures based on image metadata elements like keywords and geographic location. This is one great feature.

The main advantage of here is speed coupled with image metadata management capability. They’re also supposed to load fast and provide a direct view of the image folders on your computer.

The main disadvantage is slow image metadata bulk editing and searching. They may only have problems with speed when editing image metadata in bulk. For example if I want to add a set of keywords to 100 pictures, the software has to open each file, write the image metadata and close each file. This is slow because it involves lots of file operations that can be costly to your computer performance. However, for most home users this should not pose any problem.

Same problem applies to searching using image metadata elements. When searching your pictures collection using elements of your image metadata, this class of programs becomes slow when searching a large collection. This happens for the same reason discussed above. Namely, when searching through a large collection of pictures, the software has to open each file, analyze the contents of the metadata present in each file, close the file and then provide search results. The larger the collection, the slower the search results.

The best example of this class of image management software is XnView which is again free for personal use. This is my favorite image viewer with image metadata capabilities. It also boasts a large array of image editing tools and algorithms. This is one powerful program especially if you care about image metadata. Another commercial example of this class is Photo Mechanic which seems to be the default software professional photographers use for importing their pictures on their computer. Very powerful tool with a decent price tag. A less pricey option, but very powerful, seems to be iMatch (which I found to be user un-friendly).
Next page: Third category: Database enabled image viewers

Pages: 1 2 3

Start learning now: Download my "BIG" book.     Download my Picasa book.

    Subscribe:
    E-MAIL RSS Twitter
    Amazing resources:
    Lowest prices on coolest gadgets
    Amazing web hosting
    Best website statistics

    Related articles:

    Leave a Comment

    Web Analytics