Photo organising/managing software

[maverick28]

Hello all,
I am looking for information of a software (any falvor - freeware, opensource, licensed) that can be used to manage all my set of pictures.

Currently I do it manually
- Have different root folder for Family pics, Friend pics, DSLR photo walk pics
- When i download from camera, organize pictures by Year/Date folder structure
eg: "2010/12.Dec/2010_12_01_Sunset"
- Most of the times, name the file also by date and may be a title (eg: 2010_11_21_DowntownFireworks.jpg). Renaming using another 3rd party tool (Total Commander)
- Currently search using Windows explorer (takes time),

The process is fine except that manually doing all of the above takes some time.
- Cannot tag pictures, so that I can find it later. eg: tag "sunset" of photos in various folders.
.

I have tried Picasa. Somehow could not get adjusted since i was used to folder hierarchy. So use it only for uploading photos to PicasaWeb and to do processing.
Not tried Nikon ViewNX or Canon's Zoombrowser Ex. So not sure if it will suit my requirement.
Sorry to say, have not yet tried/used LightRoom . Have heard that it has inbuilt picture management.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions, inputs.

~
Hari

[Rentham]

Lightroom does everything you need. You can organize by sets, collections, user defined attributes (stars, flags, colors, etc), keywords, any metadata (lens used, city where the photo was taken, etc). It has a fairly robust import module that will do all of your renaming for you.

[gturner]

lightroom for me

download the trail.

[AndyNJ]

Lightroom.

I think my fiancée would l like to sue Adobe for monopolizing my time. I pretty much live in that program. It's never not open on my computer. It handles pretty much my entire workflow from importing to editing to managing. It's all I need. :-)

[sk66]

+4..........

[Fraucha]

Aperture 3 for me. But I also added all of NIK Software's plugins just to cover all of the PP bases.
View NX2 for me is a little buggy. Lightroom is excellent also.

[Dave C.]

Adobe Lightroom , you cant go wrong with it.