Help organizing digital images.

What's the best software out there for organizing images?

[Hawkgirl]

I know. I should have had them more organized all along. But I have hundreds of photos & images that are poorly organized and I need help. I'm lazy, so I'd like to organize them into 'photo album' type sections for easiest access.

If I had a Mac, I'm told that iPhoto is what I need. So what's the equivalent ... Photoshop Album 2.0? Or something else?

[jimbo_mac]

extensis's portfolio and canto's cumulus are two that I can think of.

[Jon_King]

ThumbsPlus helps me do this very well. h**p://www.cerious.com/

[Shannon Moore]

I second the vote for Thumbsplus. I'm a couple months into a massive photo consolidation/organization effort -- ThumbsPlus (Pro version) has indexed over 60k digital images thus far. Now it's time for me to do the pruning/weeding, since a lot of those images are sub-standard (blurry, etc.) digital photographs that never got edited when they were imported.

There's a web-enabled version of ThumbsPlus either already out or soon-to-be out, but I haven't used that. My experience is only with the desktop version (running WinXP here).

[tbear]

Eermmmmm.
Might sound strange, but I'd say: get it organised in your mind how you want to organise them... and then look for a programme to do the job for you.
Good luck ;)

[Shannon Moore]

FYI, ThumbsPlus (and I imagine the other apps listed) let you do just that -- establish whatever folder and file-naming scheme and keyword tagging fields you want to use and go from there.

[JayCee]

I've used ThumbsPlus in the past and consider it good, but now i use Adobe Photoshop Album and like it better.

[oilman]

I recently picked up Picasa - it's fantastic.

[tompage]

iView Media Pro started on Macs but is coming to Windows, you can have large catalogues and use it to batch process photos and you can set up html templates for index and media pages to automatically generate HTML galleries. It also catalogues, fonts, pdfs, movies and just about any other format you might want to catalogue.

They have already released a cheaper consumer version and the Pro version will be coming shortly.

www.iview-multimedia.com

(I am not related to this company just a happy customer :) )

[Hawkgirl]

Thanks for all of the suggestions. I'm going to start reading more about the choices you guys suggested. I want to have something narrowed down shortly and get things organized!