10 apps for organizing your photo collection

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

No more crowded folders with the meaningful “111” names.

1. Adobe Lightroom

Platforms: Windows, macOS.

Price: from 644 rubles per month.

Professional application used for both retouching and organizing pictures. The ability to organize your photo archive in Lightroom is impressive.

It has a convenient file import and export system that will allow you to easily add pictures to your collection and sort them into folders. Lightroom also has smart virtual folders, as well as tagging and rating photos. You can search for snapshots in the archive by keywords, metadata and file attributes. Lightroom also supports facial recognition.

However, first of all, it is a tool for professional photographers and avid amateurs. For a simple organization of a home photo archive, its capabilities are clearly too much, and it is expensive.

2. Adobe Bridge

Platforms: Windows, macOS.

Price: is free.

Adobe has another program that is designed to work with a media library - Adobe Bridge. She does not know how to edit photos, but there are more than enough sorting opportunities in her. Tags, ratings, collections, dates, keywords - the criteria of the sea.

This is a really high-quality tool that is useful for both pros and simply owners of large photo archives. Bridge was previously part of Creative Cloud and was distributed by subscription, but recently it has become completely free.

3. Corel AfterShot Pro

Platforms: Windows, macOS, Linux.

Price: 6 300 rubles.

Photo processing and sorting package from competitor Adobe. The application will help you create a neat folder structure that will be easy to understand. Photos here are easily filtered by metadata - rating, keywords, dates, tags are supported.

In addition, AfterShot can be used for photo retouching - optimizing lighting, contrast, color and other parameters. The application interface is somewhat overloaded with elements, but you can quickly get used to it.

4. ACDSee Photo Studio

Platforms: Windows, macOS.

Price: from 59, 99 dollars.

An extremely popular and time-tested photo cataloger. There are a lot of possibilities for organizing the collection of images: categories (both preset and manually created), ratings, tags, keywords and geotags. If you are not used to all the ACDSee features, you can even get confused.

Batch processing, sorting and renaming files will allow you to clean up even the largest photo archive in minutes. There is also an advanced editing toolkit: cropping, retouching, elimination of defects and noise, filters.

5.darktable

Platforms: Windows, macOS, Linux.

Price: is free.

A kind of Lightroom from the Linux world - free and open source. The program is focused on automation and is useful for those photographers who process a large number of images. It supports import from most modern digital cameras, sorts photos by reading geotags and metadata, and allows you to assign tags and ratings to files.

In addition, darktable has support for graphic tablets, and the functionality of the application can be expanded with the help of third-party modules if desired.

6. "Photos" for macOS

Platforms: macOS.

Price: is free.

This is a standard application included with macOS. And, like other software from Apple, it is convenient, beautiful and impossibly simple. Photo essentially does everything for you. It will sort the images you have by year, collection, people and places, reading geotags and metadata from files and not bothering you with unnecessary questions.

Thanks to these same filters, advanced search allows you to find photos in your library almost instantly. And smart albums automatically collect all the pictures that match the conditions you set, saving you from tedious searches.

7.digiKam

Platforms: Windows, macOS, Linux.

Price: is free.

Another free open source application. It was originally created for Linux, but later got versions for Windows and macOS.

The application supports importing photos from digital cameras, scanners and portable drives, conveniently sorting them into albums with a hierarchical structure, filtering images by metadata and geolocation, and even face recognition. Present in digiKam and the ability to assign tags to images, and the function of viewing with editing. It is one of the best free photo archive management software.

8. XnView

Platforms: Windows, macOS, Linux.

Price: is free.

Completely free, but very advanced photo viewer and cataloger. Naturally, in terms of editing images, it is inferior to expensive professional packages, but for organizing a home photo archive, XnView is enough with its head.

Batch photo processing, bulk import and sorting lets you organize and organize thousands of your photos into folders without any effort. In addition to organizing files, XnView can also be used for small detail retouching and converting images to different formats.

9. FastStone Image Viewer

Platforms: Windows.

Price: is free.

Extremely simple, yet powerful enough photo viewer with the ability to sort and catalog images. Includes a converter of image formats and a simple graphics editor. With FastStone Image Viewer, you can apply filters, resize, remove red-eye, and perform simple retouching to photos.

FastStone Image Viewer is also able to import your pictures from a camera or memory card, reading their metadata and geolocation. And then - sort the received files into folders in accordance with the structure you specified. Pros, of course, will find FastStone Image Viewer not very sophisticated, but with a home archive of photos - even quite voluminous - it will cope with a bang.

10. Shotwell

Platforms: Linux.

Price: is free.

For dessert, an app for Linux fans. Shotwell is present in many distributions, and in those where it is not, the program can be installed in just a minute. The application is inferior in capabilities to the same digiKam, but still remains an excellent tool for organizing a home album. It imports photos and videos from digital cameras, automatically grouping them by date, location and tags.

The program also supports face recognition and uploading pictures to various photo storage services.