Wanted ... Photo to DVD archiving tool

[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.

[moerl]

I meant Elements for its strenghts in photo archiving and organization, not for its image editing tools. It's true though, it isn't exactly cheap.

[tsaint]

have a look at Imatch at http://www.photools.com/ if you're still in the market for some image management s/w

[Carol Haynes]

Thanks - IMatch looks like a really nice tool, but reading the website the one function it doesn't seem to do is archive images. All the file/media management functions appear to be aimed at importing images and viewing CD snapshots off 'offline'. You can produce CDROM based webpage-style galleries, but I can't see anything in the manual for this being automated for large collections that sprawl over multiple DVDs. In fact it suggests backing up your files separately.

What I want to do is to be able to offload all my images to DVDROM to clear space on om HardDisc (currently there is about 12Gb of data taken up with photos). But I still want those photos to be instantly accessible. Archive Creator does that - you can insert any disc in the set and see thumbnails of the entire photocollection, and will tell you which disc in the set to insert to get the original files. It just seems a little expensiive for that one function (IMatch is the same price but does a lot more).

[tsaint]

Ive got a dvd filled with images, plus a few hundred meg of "pending" images on my hd. I can see thumbs of all my images (without dvd inserted), wherever they might be without loading any external media.
If I try to open an image by clicking on the thumb, if the image is on a dvd, Im prompted to insert the relevant dvd.
Hope this helps.

[Carol Haynes]

OK - right I'll check it out then. Did you just copy your photos to CDs/DVDs manually and then delete them from the hard disc or was it possible to do it in a more 'managed' way? Sorry but I find the unindexed 520 page manual really hard to use!

Out of curiosity how much HD disc space is taken up by the thumbnails?

[tsaint]

My photos are stored on the hd in directories named by date. I copied a dvd's worth of directories, then deleted from the hd. Then told imatch to update the file locations in its database.
Assuming all the thumbs are in the one imatch database directory (they better be!!!), its a total db files size of 36Mb. That's a lot, but I guess its the price needed to be paid for the immediate access to the thumbs.

[Carol Haynes]

36Mb is nothing (compared to >12Gb)

Thanks that's useful - I'll definitely give it a look

[Innuendo]

Not free, but I have to chime in here with my favorite digital image organizational tool. I use ACDSee v8 for everything regarding digital images & it has the capability to archive photos to CD & DVD.

Maybe we could get mouser to bully them into giving us all a discount?

[Carol Haynes]

I have used ACDSee since version 3 and in my humble opinion it has got worse rather than better in each version. So much so that I have now uninstalled it and don't really intend to use it again.

The final straw for me was the introduction of Camera RAW formats. The rendering of Canon RAW formats (at least on my computer) was utterly hideous - the colours were all wrong, they were dark and murky. Not a problem in any other program I have tried. I am using colour management (including the ACDSee ProtoPro plugin).

When I asked for help to get it resolved they fobbed me off with wait for the next update ... guess what the next update made no difference and the one after that was another $50 ... I decided I had given them enough money, I'd rather look elsewhere.

I am actually very impressed with FastStone Image Viewer (which is free) and following recent posts and considering IMatch - though at the moment I am thinking of going with Archive Creator 3 (at the start of this thread) which does exactly what I want and is very clean at archiving. Just a bit pricy for that songle function.

[Innuendo]

Carol, I have to agree with you to a point. After v3 things went progressively downhill with v6 being the absolute worst. However, v7 & now v8 are both very fast & feature-rich.

I don't deal with RAW formatted files often, though, so your mileage may vary.

[Carol Haynes]

have a look at Imatch at http://www.photools.com/ if you're still in the market for some image management s/w

Hi tsaint,

I have been playing with Imatch over the last week and have given up on it.

The biggest problems I can see with the see witht he software are:

• Not particularly intuitive interface
• Manual isn't indexed and is massive to try and work through
• Doesn't automatically display EXIF data for either of my digital cameras

I emailed the author who was quick to respond about the EXIF issue. He argues that Canon EXIF data isn't exif data but custom Canon data. Whilst this may be true all other packages I have tried that claim to support the camera manage to display the EXIF data as normal EXIF data. Add to that the same problem happens with the Kodak camera I have and it is not really much use to me compared to lots of other products.

He did point out that I can force the 'custom' data to be displayed, but it means editing a text file with dozens of  numbered fields manually, and I would have to do that for both cameras.

Strikes me if software claims to support a particular camera (in this case the Canon EOS Rebel/300D) then it should do the work - not expect me to do it all manually. Plus as I have two cameras I would have to set it up to display two lots of data which means the EXIF display would consist of 50% blank details which ever camera I use - a little irritating and not exactly friendly.

I have emailed back to explain why I am not going to use IMatch (at least not until some of the issues are sorted out).

Thanks for the idea though.