In the past I would organize pictures on my hard drive by folder name. I always though it was a pretty good system. If I wanted to see 4th of July picture I would simply to the folder called “4th_Of_July”.

One day my wife was complaining about my perfect photo organizing system. She said she couldn’t find anything. I was flabbergasted, how much simpler could my system be ? I asked what she was looking for. She said she wanted to find pictures of her mother. I paused because she had a good point. We currently have at least 3000 photos on the hard drive and we will soon start to scan all of our old photos to place them on the computer. It would be nice to categorize pictures in many different ways without creating all kinds of crazy redundant folders.

I briefly researched a number of photo organizing software. After taking a look at a few different options I came up with a list of key features I think are useful for organizing folders.

• The ability to tag pictures with multiple categories.
• Allow me to still organize the folders on the hard drive in some kind of logical manner.
• Minimize application dependency. I don’t want to waste hours organizing picture in a software package that will no longer be available next year.

One way to minimize application dependency is to write data to the image itself rather than a proprietary database. One such method is called IPTC headers. IPTC headers allow you save metadata right in the picture itself. This would allow other software to read this data. IPTC headers are similar to EXIF data.

Our photo organizer in the past was Kodak EasyShare. The latest version is pretty nice. It allows you to create “albums”. When you place a picture in an album it leaves the photo in the original location on the hard drive. In other the albums are virtual pointers to files very similar to playlists in Itunes. It has some photo editing capabilities.

I also looked at Picasa. I like the fact it is free and it seems pretty quick. Picasa allows you to organize picture by folders and albums. If you move a photo to a different folder it moves it on your hard drive as well. You are allowed to place pictures into multiple albums. Picasa doesn’t allow you to apply multiple terms or folders like “Dad” and “Disney”. Placing pictures in an album does not change the IPTC Keywords in the file. If you want to do that you have to so it is a separate step. Overall Picasa is a good program to organize photos.

Adobe Photoshop Elements

Photoshop Elements is around $90 and allows gives you advanced editing and sharing options.

The tagging feature in Photoshop elements is superior to Picasa. IPTC Keywords are saved to the file at the same time you create the tags in the editor. You simply create tags and then selct the photos you want to tag and then you drag the tag over the pictures. You can add multiple tags at the same time. This workflow is much faster than Picasa’s. Elements also allows you to have subcategiories of tags in Elements.
For Example:
/family/mom
/family/dad/
/places/california/
/places/home/

Photoshop Elements also has a great backup utility.

Conclusion:
For many Picasa would make a fine photo organizer, especially for the price. However when I tested both programs along with my autofeed photo scanner the workflow to import and tag picture was much faster in Elements.