I would welcome some input on this subject.
At the moment I store all my original materials in a single folder and then if I do any irreversible processing, the results are put elsewhere. I wanted to preserve the originals as they were, no matter how bad!
So far this has worked because I have a relatively small number of photographs (1200 ish) but this is set to grow as I undertake the mammoth task of scanning in all the prints that I have. What I need to do now is organize the photographs in some way so that I can find individual, or groups, of photographs to process. I started with Adobe Photoshop Album because the tagging process is very quick and simple, tags can be organized and in addition collections can be made. However, as far as I have been able to find out, Photoshop Album cannot read EXIF data and sometimes it helps to have that sort of detail about a photo. So I am looking elsewhere and the choice is enormous.
My favourite so far is Zoner Photo Studio 8 Home Edition (which I obtained from a cover disk and hence is not really free) but I have dipped into various other programs and this is the problem. Full testing takes so much time that the primary task of organizing the photos goes out of the window so what is your favourite (free) software?
Some of the things I would like to see are:
Ability to edit and write IPTC data and read EXIF data. The only EXIF data I want to add/edit is the date the photograph was taken.
Custom, but fixed aspect ratio, cropping (to prepare photographs for use in a digital frame)
Rotation(lossless as far as possible) of images.
Simple but flexible fixing of brighness, contrast, saturation etc (auto as well as sliders)
Proper (that is combined AND and OR) searching using any metadata as well as keywords and filenames.
Production of ordered lists for input to programs like Photo Story to be converted ultimately to DVD slideshows and combined with home video.
At the moment I store all my original materials in a single folder and then if I do any irreversible processing, the results are put elsewhere. I wanted to preserve the originals as they were, no matter how bad!
So far this has worked because I have a relatively small number of photographs (1200 ish) but this is set to grow as I undertake the mammoth task of scanning in all the prints that I have. What I need to do now is organize the photographs in some way so that I can find individual, or groups, of photographs to process. I started with Adobe Photoshop Album because the tagging process is very quick and simple, tags can be organized and in addition collections can be made. However, as far as I have been able to find out, Photoshop Album cannot read EXIF data and sometimes it helps to have that sort of detail about a photo. So I am looking elsewhere and the choice is enormous.
My favourite so far is Zoner Photo Studio 8 Home Edition (which I obtained from a cover disk and hence is not really free) but I have dipped into various other programs and this is the problem. Full testing takes so much time that the primary task of organizing the photos goes out of the window so what is your favourite (free) software?
Some of the things I would like to see are:
Ability to edit and write IPTC data and read EXIF data. The only EXIF data I want to add/edit is the date the photograph was taken.
Custom, but fixed aspect ratio, cropping (to prepare photographs for use in a digital frame)
Rotation(lossless as far as possible) of images.
Simple but flexible fixing of brighness, contrast, saturation etc (auto as well as sliders)
Proper (that is combined AND and OR) searching using any metadata as well as keywords and filenames.
Production of ordered lists for input to programs like Photo Story to be converted ultimately to DVD slideshows and combined with home video.