Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion
Why is it so hard to find a decent image organizer?
cmpm:
I'd suggest looking at Corel if you are shopping.
They have come a long way i think.
http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite/us/en/Product/1184951547051#tabview=tab0
I tried a few of their products and like them all.
Dormouse:
I'm confused.
What's the difference between a browser+sorter+tagger and a cataloger?
-zevel (April 06, 2010, 04:54 PM)
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A cataloger stores details of all your photos, allowing very fast searches, allows you to keep lots of different virtual collections, keep track of different versions of the same thing.
A browser, sorter, tagger is like a file explorer taking in details of all the files, allowing you to browse them and add tags, ratings etc. It allows you to sort them rapidly, so that you can decide what to keep or not etc. PM allows you to add tags to the photo itself as well as to a sidecar (not many progs did that at the beginning though a number do now). Most cataloging products allow you to do all of these as well as being catalogers, but they won't (usually at least) be so fast.
You need to realise that this market is full of very, very specialised programs mostly at high prices. Adobe Bridge is another example of the same sort of product. Some progs specialise purely in downloading images from cards and cameras (eg Breeze Downloader).
tomos:
thanks Dormouse, things are getting slowly clearer ;)
PM allows you to add tags to the photo itself as well as to a sidecar
-Dormouse (April 06, 2010, 05:16 PM)
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Is one of these preferable?
IPTC is stored as part of the file AFAIK - isnt that (IPTC) pretty much a 'standard' ? (I suspect if I reread this thread that's covered somewhere :-[)
A browser, sorter, tagger is like a file explorer taking in details of all the files, allowing you to browse them and add tags, ratings etc.
-Dormouse (April 06, 2010, 05:16 PM)
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that's a good description of Exif Pro then
(but I'm not sure of it's RAW capabilities)
superboyac:
Yes, Dormouse's last couple of posts are good. I didn't realize until lately in this thread how specialized this market was, and how confused I was about it.
True, Photo Mechanic is not a cataloger. The way I've had it explained to me from photographers is that when they take a bunch of pictures, they first browse through them using Photo Mechanic. They pick their files, sort them, do whatever they have to do to get the batch of photos they want to work with. Then, they pass those photos to a real photo editing and/or managing application like Lightroom or something. The benefit is that when you have hundreds or thousands of RAW files, you can browse through them very very quickly. In other programs, there is a slight delay while the program reads the big RAW files. Like, you have to wait for thumbnails to load, for pictures to render, etc.
So that's the workflow as I understand it from the photographers.
It sounds like if you don't have a lot of RAW files, maybe PM is not for you? Or if you're not a photographer? I don't know...
Dormouse:
The big advantage of PM is speed. It can process RAW files at high speed which is a critically important feature for a lot of professional photogs who need who need to get their photos on the market or with their customer ASAP. It isn't really a RAW converter in that it doesn't produce the best images, but it reads and processes raw files so that they are easy to sort, tag etc. Scripts for automatically appending copyright notices etc etc. Amateurs with a lot of photos can value this speed too.
It is also fast with other types of format. RAW just matters most because the file sizes are much bigger & take more processing and professionals prefer to shoot in RAW.
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