Digital Media Core: Photos

OK, this isn't cheap, but photo management software: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. This is ideal for working with RAW files, and good for JPEG as well. One of its key advantages is its non-destructive photo editing - the original (or any history) of the photo is always available, like Windows "Previous Versions" features. For JPEG photos, there is an added advantage in that the photo is not re-compressed using lossy compression everytime it is saved. You can imagine how much detail could be lost after 10 photo editing sessions - Lightroom prevents this. I also believe that JPEG is a great format for sharing images due to its universal compatibility and small size, but its a terrible format for maintaining your master collection due to the lossy nature of its compression which has an additive effect after many photo editing sessions. For backup, Windows Home Server.

One more note about Adobe Photoshop Lightroom when working with JPEGs: Lightroom does not touch the original JPEG file, and merely saves the cumulative list of editing commands that were performed on the file. Each time the file is loaded, the editing commands are re-applied to the photo in memory. This allows the JPEG photo to live without suffering the effects of multiple lossy file save cycles, plus provides a complete undo history for the edits over the entire life of the file. In other words, you will always have the original photo "negative" forever.

Google picasa is a fine program, I like it a lot. On the Mac side, shoebox is quite an interesting program to classify and retrieve picture collections by keywords: http://www.kavasoft.com/Shoebox/ Otherwise ivewmedia pro (which apparently belongs to Microsoft now to mt surprise !) is a renown app too: http://www.iview-multimedia.com/mediapro/

I've been playing around with Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 recently. It also saves original files as a backup. Nice program, especially for the price. Sure gives Photoshop a run for its money. Paul, if you have access to Microsoft's Expression Suite, why not use Expression Media? Action Pack subscribers can avail to the full Expression Suite by taking (and passing) one of the free Microsoft web courses online which qualifies for the Web Developer Special Edition Action Pack supplement for no additional charge. It's not free persay (unless you follow the above suggestions), but it's a huge step up from any of the free applications that are out there. Mac users may remember the program as "iView MediaPro". There's also a wealth of information here: http://www.microsoft.com/prophoto/ These programs also look very interesting: http://www.photodex.com/

For editing, I use Windows Live Photo Gallery for quick and dirty tasks such as Red Eye or a quick crop. For the heavier tasks I use Photoshop. I use JPEG files due to their compatability across platforms/environments, but I'm seriously looking into making all my new photos RAW. If I do this I may have to look at Lightroom for management. I've just got to sit down and way up the benfits and impacts of using RAW. I use Folder Share (Microsofts best perpetual beta product ever!) to sync my photo's around to the other 4 computers in my house. After using RoboCopy and Sync Toy for years, Folder Share blows them away. For my family photos I utilize Flickr for online management. Flickr has some great client tools to assit in uploading photos and now Live Photo Gallery supports it......sweet! For for my abstract photos (I'm learning to use my new Canon 400D) I use Zooomr as its targeted for professional photographers and its free. As with everyone I'm trying to live in the cloud these days, so aside from the Folder Share replica's, I use Mozy.com's great online backup service. For a small yearly free I get unlimited online storage. Currently I have 58Gb in the cloud of photos and home videos.

I use Lightroom because I shoot in RAW (mainly to cover my poor photography skills and recover photos later when they look bad) and export the JPGs in the resolution of the screen and use Picasa for doing adhoc slideshows, emailing via gmail, maybe use picasaweb. Lightroom is also excellent for digitial asset management like keywording etc. Lightroom can also export directly to the flickr uploadr. I have managed to keep quite a few bad photos because I could recover white balance or exposure etc. in Lightroom. So for me Lightroom and Picasa work quite well together. As for online backups, I use SFFS and Amazon S3. Super Flexible File Synchroniser is a great program for syncing the laptop with main pc and usb backup drives etc. It also has a S3 backend so will keep your digital files up to date with the backup S3 copy. It took a while, but I now have 35 Gb up there. SFFS will also run as a windows service so it can automatically update your backup for you. I reckon that SFFS would also be perfect for running on Windows Home Server to put your files up on S3 - and fill in the missing part of the backup story. S3 is so inexpensive that it is just so much easier than buying a new disk every 6 months - and you will never run out of storage space, have a disk crash, get robbed, lose it in a fire etc. etc. SFFS is here http://www.superflexible.com/ - $60 for the pro version to get S3 support - a bit more than the usual shareware price but worth it for piece of mind - and it is better than all the other file synchronizers I have tried. There is a page with extra instructions on how to setup SFFS for S3 here http://www.superflexible.com/amazons3.htm davidp.

PhotoShop starter edition is a good photo organizer and is equivalent to Picasa and Live Photo Gallery.

I use ACDSee. version 10 is a little buggy for me. The reason I like it is because it opens my photos fast from Windows Explorer. I don't actually open the application it self that much,unless i want to tag them or else. for my burning needs I use Nero, like very other person.

I'm a big fan of ACDSee Pro 2. It's very quick, the tagging is really well done, and it interfaces seemlessly with Flickr (Which I use as my photo backup system). It's ability to handle batch processing is also wonderful, as it makes editing and organizing thousands of files a snap. Lastly, it has a decent DB backend, so you can easily view/find files using tags, exif data, etc... even when you have 10,000s of files.