Managing my images instead of being swamped by them - HELP!

[jsl]

Hi all,

So I've been researching this for the past few weeks and I keep getting to a dead end - so I'm turning to you amazing DPS folk again...

Like many of you, I don't have a problem taking many pictures but I often have a problem going through all of them, sorting them out, and categorising them. I take a lot of portrait shots (mainly of my kids) so I set my camera on drive mode a lot and end up with multiple pictures - all looking decent. I also actively try to take fewer, and more planned shots to reduce the number of images.

Please can someone recommend me software that is good for workflow on a PC. I have a lot of photos (mainly portraiture) to go through and my priority is tagging them and rating them so that I will be able to look back at them in years to come and be able to find "the best ones".

I have Photoshop CS4 (and thus Bridge). I used to import pictures using Bridge and this was fairly decent except it doesn't seem to let me view photos by date taken (which is a feature I love in Windows Media Player. Recently, I started using Picasa which is great at Face recognition but all the meta data that I tag (e.g. faces and locations) ends up in a .picasa file so I'm a bit weary of future compatibility. Furthermore, Picasa doesn't modify the star rating (0-5) on the actual file.

Ultimately, I'd just like to be able to manage my images a lot better by being able to:
- find people better
- tag and find images according to rating
- categorise images meaningfully.

Can anyone recommend me any software for this task? Or am I using the most suitable? I don't mind spending money. I (still!) get confused between lightroom and elements.

Thank you for your help...
From,

[jdepould]

Lightroom basically combines Bridge and ACR, and adds a few other things you may or may not use. Keywording and metadata management are huge. Putting a little bit of thought into your import process (keywords, folder names, file names), pays back huge dividends when you're looking for a file 18 months later.

[jsl]

Thanks for your response Jamie! Does Lightroom handle all those things you mentioned such as keywords, folder names, filenames, etc? Does this mean I should purchase Adobe Lightroom? If so, what's the difference between this and Adobe Elements?

Thank you!

[dharmit]

I would suggest you have a look at Picasa before you fork out around $300

If you like Picasa, I would have saved you $300, if not, well Picasa is free and worth the effort.

Cheers

[kirbinster]

Lightroom is a killer app that will do exactly what you want. It will let you quickly find any photo years down the road.

[zappo]

If you are unsure about LR, get the LR3 Beta. It's fully functional and will work until LR3 comes out:

Adobe Labs - Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3

[jsl]

Thanks guys! So I've been using Adobe Elements (trial) the past few weeks and it does what it says on the tin and fairly well. It just seems to be super slow (as it's still scanning all my 25,000 pictures :S I read a review of Lightroom and it seems to do even more but I'm not sure that I can warrant £93 on it (I'm a student) - especially because I already have Photoshop CS4. I like some elements of Picasa but don't like the fact that it has is own (incompatible) implementation of things like face tagging and star ratings...

Lightroom 2 would cost me £93 and Elements 8 would cost me £47. Which would you go for?

Does Lightroom do everything that Elements does? If not, what are the main things that it misses out? Is Elements basically for beginners and Lightroom for advanced amateurs/advanced?

[dharmit]

jsl,

There is a fundamental difference between Lightroom and PS Elements. Lightroom is a cataloging software that has capabilities to do photo editing (with the LR3 beta that I tested, it is amazing at doing layers and using brushes). PS Elements is a Post Processing software only (Adobe Bridge does Cataloging for Elements)

Lightroom stores its edits and metadata to a database (also you can save it as xmp file) and these edits and metadata in xmp file can be read by PS Elements with the help of Bridge. PS Elements saves the edits in a non destructive manner if you save to its native format, if not, the edits you do on the photo are destructive and it is difficult to go back to where you started.

Without much going on and on, I would say that if you have CS4 (as mentioned in one of your posts), use Bridge with it for cataloging if you don't want to spend extra cash.

Why do you want to use Elements when you already have CS4?

On the other side, when you said you dont like Picasa's incompatible face tagging and star rating, there are several ways you can make those metadata heard in other softwares. Well, I let Picasa scan for faces and then just select all the photos that has that person add a tag of that person to the image. As for the star rating, even I dont like a single star, so I add tags like "1Star", "2Star" etc to the photos.

Cheers
Dharmit