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Wanted ... Photo to DVD archiving tool

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Carol Haynes:
I have tried ArchiveCreator 3 and it does pretty much what I want, it just seems rather expensive at $60

Anyone know of a tool that can do this job as simply and as well that is either free/donationware or Open Source? Failing that cheaper?

The thing I really like is being able to take a hieracrchy of photo folders (of which I have many) and generate a linked set of DVDs with all the photos stored and easily indexed. In particular it is nice to be able to insert any disc in the set, click on the menu item and see all the thumbnails and which disc to load. It also supports camera RAW formats which is good (in particular Canon RAW).

moerl:
Have you tried the new Picasa? Everywhere I look, people can't stop raving about it. This will certainly become an issue for me soon enough as I ordered new digital photo equipment just yesterday! I got a new digicam, a flash memory card and a card reader. Something that seems extremely popular and has very good critical acclaim in all things photo organization and archiving is Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0.

Carol Haynes:
Actually I had Picassa installed.

My only gripes with Picassa are that I really hate the way it organises the folders ... I like to have the option of looking at folders via Explorer style trees etc. I have literally hundreds of folders with photos in them (633 to be precise) and having them all appear outside a hierarchy in alphabetical or chronological order is next to useless from my point of view. Maybe I am missing something ...

It is nice that you can do spanned backups across a number of CDs and DVDs, and that it takes all the fromats I need (inc. Canon CRW files) and movies, but the only option with these discs seems to be to restore them via the on disc program.

I haven't actually burnt a set (I will give it a go), but if this is the case then it is no good for me - I need to be able to find and access individual pictures quickly, and retrieve just the ones I need.

Part of the problem with Picassa is that it isn't as simple as it first appears, and the documentation is pretty minimal.

One of the nice things is that you can post pictures directly into your blogs from Picassa (if they are hosted at www.blogger.com) ... neat.

moerl:
I never liked its organizational side either, to be honest. I hate having it display my picture folders on the left.. I like using tags to organize pictures, and not organize them by folder. It's much more effective that way. That's why I used to love BrilliantPhoto. It's an excellent photo organizer, but development has pretty much halted and I don't like using software that isn't actively being developed when I *KNOW* there is room for improvement. I'd give Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0 a shot if I were you. Tell me how you like it. I've never tried the latest version, (4.0).

Carol Haynes:
PShop Elements is too expensive, I may as well just get the archiver which does the job I want really neatly. I already have a full version of PhotoShop 7, so there isn't much point in buying Elements.

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