Free & Paid Photo Organising & Workflow Software

[edneeves]

Following on from my problems with Picasa displaying RAW's, the thread (here) seemed to take a sideways direction.

I was looking for peoples opinions on Free and Paid software and their reasons for them liking it.

For example:

Picasa2; Whilst a wonderful piece of software for organisation it seems to have some serious issues when it comes to RAW reproduction. Unfortunately I have found this to be the easiest program for organising my photos!

If people could explain the good and the bad them it will help others to make an informed decision with software.

[moz]

For going through newly shot jpegs I still greatly prefer ACDSee 3.1. The newer versions of that software suck a lot more resources and work more slowly as a result. Unfortunately 3.1 doesn't work too well under WinXP, it can't save settings for some reason. But it beats most slideshow programs hands down (IRFanView, Pixort, BreezeBrowser, PaintShopPro, Photoshop).

I use BreezeBrowser for generating web pages because it's hugely flexible but unfortuneately BreezeSys are ripoff merchants and have a bad record when it comes to supporting existing customers. I'm probably replacing this with a Perl script which I've got half-written but that's part of my "move to better gallery software" project that has stalled.

I switched from BB to Bibble for processing RAW files and love it. It stores processing settings for each image as an ini file (tiny) rather than making you remember what you did to make the TIFF file (huge). And it runs a background queue, so you can scream through making edits and then walk away until they're all finished. No more edit-wait-edit-wait cycles. The major issues with this are a few display bugs (it reloads floating toolbars in odd ways for me) and it is crap at generating web pages. Images for web pages are fine, but the HTML output options are limited.

[skyva]

HI, I use viewraw, which is a free program for nikon cameras that shows nef files and allows you to manipulate them. I use it on my laptop when travelling, as I can download raw images from the camera, view them, organise as necessary, delete etc. It also has the abilty to manipulate the image, provides easy view of the shooting data, and is much faster and easier than nikon capture if you just want to view files. It also lets you view them from an external reader, which is handy. If you want to view raw files quickly (for example if you didn't shoot raw +jpeg) then it is great, much faster on a laptop. I have not used it for serious photo editing, but it may do that too.
I do not use it on my main pc, which is much faster and used for editting with paintshop or nikon capture, which obviously are much more powerful, but need heaps of ram, grunty chip and more storage.
I use Picasa 2 on the home pc as well.