Ok, I am a geek. I love good soft­ware, and I am always chas­ing the next “Big Thing”. In pho­tog­ra­phy, the “Big Thing” over the last few years has been Dig­i­tal Asset Man­age­ment soft­ware. With the announce­ment from Apple of Aper­ture 3, and the impend­ing arrival of Adobe Light­room 3, I felt its about time that I updated my pre­vi­ous post on soft­ware for Pho­tog­ra­phers. So below I out­line my views on some of the lead­ing con­tenders, includ­ing Google Picasa, Apple iPhoto, and Adobe Pho­to­shop Ele­ments. In part 2, I will cover the more pro­fes­sional ori­en­tated offer­ings (at least in price) such as Apple Aper­ture, Adobe Light­room, and some more exotic candidates.

What Is Dig­i­tal Asset Management?

Before we jump into the overviews, it’s prob­a­bly not a bad idea to out­line very briefly what we mean by Dig­i­tal Asset Man­age­ment. From Wikipedia:

Dig­i­tal asset man­age­ment (DAM) con­sists of man­age­ment tasks and deci­sions sur­round­ing the inges­tion, anno­ta­tion, cat­a­logu­ing, stor­age, retrieval and dis­tri­b­u­tion of dig­i­tal assets. Dig­i­tal pho­tographs, ani­ma­tions, videos and music are sam­ples of media asset man­age­ment (a sub-category of DAM). Dig­i­tal asset man­age­ment sys­tems includes com­puter soft­ware and/or hard­ware sys­tems that aid in the process of dig­i­tal asset management.

With the advent of Dig­i­tal Cam­eras, (and now the emer­gence of Dig­i­tal cam­eras shoot­ing video), the num­ber of orig­i­nal photo’s, edits, scans, etc. clut­ter­ing up our com­put­ers has exploded. Dig­i­tal Asset Man­age­ment processes and soft­ware prod­ucts attempt to help us cat­a­log, edit, rearrange, prune, locate and oth­er­wise man­age the thou­sands and thou­sands of dig­i­tal pho­tos and videos scat­tered around our hard disks. For a more in-depth exam­i­na­tion of Dig­i­tal Asset Man­age­ment, I can highly rec­om­mend The DAM Book: Dig­i­tal Asset Man­age­ment for Pho­tog­ra­phers by Peter Krogh.

Ini­tially, DAM soft­ware prod­ucts restricted them­selves to sim­ply track­ing the loca­tion of image files, and per­haps arrang­ing them in vir­tual col­lec­tions and albums. Now they offer so much more, and the line between them and Gorilla sized image edit­ing pack­ages such as Adobe Pho­to­shop is blur­ring more and more. Even Scott Kelby, author of many Pho­to­shop books, admits that he now spends 85% of his time in Adobe Light­room! The two main cri­te­ria I used to select the fol­low­ing prod­ucts were:

1. Soft­ware per­forms typ­i­cal DAM tasks such as cat­a­loging, rat­ing, tag­ging, cre­ation of vir­tual collections
2. Soft­ware per­forms some level of global image adjust­ment, such as expo­sure, white bal­ance, or other tonal adjustments

Win­dows Live Photo Gallery

Many peo­ple are quiet happy to use the build in image pre­view­ing and tag­ging capa­bil­i­ties of Win­dows Vista or Win­dows 7. For those who want a bit more, Microsoft offers Win­dows Live Photo Gallery as a free down­load as part of the Win­dows Live suite. It brings enhanced photo brows­ing using the cap­ture date embed­ded in the image, and peo­ple tag­ging. You can make some basic global adjust­ments to images such as sharp­ness, though these tend to be auto­matic with lit­tle tun­ing capa­bil­ity. Uploads to Flickr and Win­dows Live is sup­ported natively, and Face­book using a plugin.

An inter­est­ing fea­ture is sup­port for Win­dows Live Sync which allows you to sync photo col­lec­tions between computers.

Pro:

• Free
• Prob­a­bly the eas­i­est to use above direc­to­ries of images
• If you are famil­iar with Win­dows Vista or 7, you will be com­fort­able here

Con:

• RAW image sup­port is lim­ited to that pro­vided by the under­ly­ing oper­at­ing system
• No sup­port for vir­tual col­lec­tions, except by tags
• Lim­ited searching
• Lim­ited con­trol over image adjustment

Details:

• Link: http://windowslive.com/Desktop/PhotoGallery
• Cost: Free
• Plat­forms: Windows
• Tar­get: Entry level pho­tog­ra­phers with com­pact dig­i­tal cam­eras who want a sim­ple to use, yet famil­iar look­ing tool to man­age their photos.

iPhoto

I must admit that I have never used this iPhoto from Apple in anger, apart from play­ing with it in the Syd­ney Apple Store. It is part of the iLife suite of cre­ative prod­ucts which nor­mally comes pre-installed with any new Mac, and at a cost for those who wish to upgrade. iPhoto is tar­geted at the com­pact dig­i­tal cam­era wield­ing home user who just wants to tweak jpeg pho­tos. Some of its organ­i­sa­tion tools are strong though,and include the abil­ity to cre­ate var­i­ous types of albums, and use tools such as the auto­matic face detec­tion, and loca­tion tag­ging using GPS sup­port. Like most appli­ca­tions designed by Apple, the inter­face looks won­der­ful, espe­cially the full screen view.

Pro:

• Sim­ple to use
• Upload to Flickr, Face­book, and MobileMe
• Cre­ate Slideshows, Photo Books, and other Print Creations

Con:

• Mac only
• RAW image sup­port is lim­ited to that pro­vided by the under­ly­ing oper­at­ing system
• Lim­ited con­trol over image adjustment

Details:

• Link: http://www.apple.com/ilife/iphoto/
• Cost: US$62.95
• Plat­forms: Mac OSX
• Tar­get: Entry level pho­tog­ra­phers with com­pact dig­i­tal cameras
• Buy: iLife ’09 (includes iPhoto)

Picasa

Picasa from Google has in my impres­sion got nearly every­thing that some­one who loves pho­tos would want. Sure, you don’t have indi­vid­ual pixel edit­ing al a Pho­to­shop, or the fine-grained RAW con­trols present in most of the pro level prod­ucts out­lined below, but it sure is fun! It now has RAW sup­port, vir­tual albums, can sync auto­mat­i­cally up to Google Picasa Web Albums, face tag­ging, geo loca­tion, and the won­der­ful col­lage tool, for cre­at­ing col­lages such as the one at the very top of this post (great for desk­top wall­pa­pers!). And it is avail­able for all the major plat­forms. It doesn’t natively sup­port Flickr or Face­book to my knowl­edge, but it is still my go to pro­gram for any­one who needs photo man­age­ment on a budget.

Pro:

• Free
• Avail­able on most platforms
• Very quick
• Great fun

Con:

• Some­times the inter­face can be a lit­tle clut­tered and con­fus­ing, in that there are so many tog­gle switches, slid­ers, big but­tons all over the screen.
• Do not let it index your entire hard disk — unless you want to wade through all sorts of cached image files for inter­net browsers, and other rubbish
• Lim­ited con­trol over image adjustment
• RAW sup­port while good, is not a match for PRO products

Details:

• Link: http://picasa.google.com/
• Cost: Free
• Plat­forms: Win­dows, Mac OSX, Linux
• Tar­get: Entry level, but some aspects are use­ful and fun for all photographers

Adobe Pho­to­shop Elements

I was a long time Pho­to­shop Ele­ments user, ini­tially for the cheap entry point into the pixel manip­u­lat­ing mad­ness of Pho­to­shop. But you end up spend­ing most of your time in the Ele­ments Organ­iser… sort­ing, renam­ing, tag­ging, etc. that the pow­er­ful image edit­ing tools tend to get over­looked. It packs a lot of power into a rea­son­able cheap pack­age, includ­ing Adobe Cam­era RAW and sup­port for hun­dreds of pro­fes­sional dig­i­tal SLR’s. It does have its lim­i­ta­tions though. When I was using it, it didn’t sup­port lay­ers, non destruc­tive edit­ing, advanced renam­ing, or automa­tion using Pho­to­shop Actions. It was win­ning an expen­sive set of Pho­to­shop Actions that finally made me jump for Light­room and Pho­to­shop itself.

Pro:

• Very pow­er­ful image edit­ing tools, 95% of what Pho­to­shop offers for a frac­tion of the price
• Great organ­i­sa­tional fea­tures, that were only matched with Adobe Light­room appeared
• Superb RAW sup­port through Adobe Cam­era RAW

Con:

• Seemed like there was a new ver­sion every year, with some use­ful fea­tures, but a lot of filler
• Enough of the tools from Pho­to­shop to tempt you, before trip­ping you up with some gotcha

Details:

• Link: http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopelwin/
• Cost: US$74.99 (Win­dows), US$85.49 (Mac OSX)
• Plat­forms: Win­dows, Mac OSX
• Buy: Adobe Pho­to­shop Ele­ments 8 (Win­dows), Adobe Pho­to­shop Ele­ments 8 (Mac OSX)
• Tar­get: Advanced Ama­teur, should be included with every DSLR