How do you deal with your photos?

[moominmolly]

I dislike iPhoto kind of a lot, which makes me curious what different people use to manage/browse/tag/sort/keep their photos. I'm currently using F-Spot Photo Manager (on Linux); what do you use, and on what platform? Lightroom? iPhoto? Aperture? Something else? I personally commonly need to sort photos on Linux, Windows, AND MacOS, depending on the day, so I'm interested in all answers. :)

Comments

[rezendi.livejournal.com]

I like Picasa, which I believe runs on all three of those OSes...

[miss-chance.livejournal.com]

They may have fixed the issue by now but I tried Picassa a few versions of ago and it took so long to try to catalog my photo-directory that it froze my laptop and crashed it a couple times.
It might be better now, but it totally bit it for me about a year ago on a laptop running Windows 2000.

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

I had roughly this experience, but I'm willing to believe it has improved. I will try it again...

[geekpixie.livejournal.com]

last I heard picasa had crap for uploading from macos (or at least last my guy complained about it) so I'd check that out.

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

it was pretty sucky on linux too. didn't crash the laptop, but took so long i had to kill it.

[miss-chance.livejournal.com]

I doubt I have anywhere near the number of photos that you have, but I like Adobe Bridge a lot.

I have photos I might use for my cut-pieces and they have keywords (roof peaks, phone wires, 1 person, 2 people, bikes, etc.... things I might search for later). I also will go through my photos of my work when I'm applying for a competition and keyword images with, say "MCC Grant," then, later, when I'm applying for something else, I might pull up MCC Grant-tagged images, and add the tag "Bromfield."

I think Bridge is big and slow sometimes, but it talks natively to Camera Raw, so will generate previews from raws according to presets, and can convert from raw to jpg without having to also go through photoshop which I also like. I'm pretty happy with the configurable workspaces, too.

[regyt.livejournal.com]

I've been using Canon software, but I hate it with great hatings. I am watching this post's comments with great interest.

[sol3.livejournal.com]

I'm a huge fan of lightroom - and you can play with Beta 3 for free until April, 2010! I've used it on both windows and OS X, and have heard rumor that it plays nicely under wine on linux.

I find it really fast to go through and cull photos, tag them, do most of my edits (I haven't opened up photoshop in over a year), the editing is non-destructive and you can quickly/easily make virtual copies of things.

Beta 3 adds direct interaction/support for flickr - and there's useful plugins for services like smugmug and facebook (and I can't wait until those get updated for LR's bi-directional support - so that things like comments and such can be sync'd back to you).

Also, unlike iPhoto, Lightroom makes it easy to split your collection. I usually only have the current month's worth of photos on my laptop, the rest are on an external drive - but I have one lightroom library (well, two now - lightroom 2 and the one for lightroom 3) that still has/tracks all the metadata/thumbnails and such so I can still poke through my library even when my drive array is disconnected.

[sol3.livejournal.com]

Er, not "Beta 3" - "Lightroom 3 Beta" :)

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

The split collection thing sounds extremely useful.

[coraline]

lightroom is the way and the, er, Light.
they actually hired honest-to-god UI engineers, and it is way slicker and more intuitive than i expected. and with university discount, it's only $99.

[sol3.livejournal.com]

Not only that, but a number of the core engineers on it were hard core photographers - who started working on this specifically because bridge/photoshop was clunky to work with.

It's also fast - one of the reasons I went with it over aperture early on is because I was working on a lower power machine, and aperture wants beefy. I actually run lightroom on my little msi-wind running snow leopard for doing photo work when wandering around (the wind fits in my smallest camera bags, the laptop, not so much)

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

Whoa, you run it on that thing? OK, you've sold me.

[fengshui.livejournal.com]

No, no! It's "You're braver than I thought!" :)

[srl.livejournal.com]

Does lightroom have support for extending metadata to include custom fields? The $99 student discount makes it sound like something I might go for.

[sol3.livejournal.com]

I haven't played with it - but it looks like people have come up with ways to Create custom metadata sets

[sol3.livejournal.com]

In fact, Lightroom goodies has a great set of lightroom plugins/additions. I don't know whether or not these have been vetted with lightroom 3 yet, but i used the smugmug, facebook, and flickr exporters in lightroom 2 happily.

[fengshui.livejournal.com]

What field are you looking for, specifically?

[srl.livejournal.com]

Arbitrary fields defined by me, as well as XMP fields. I'm a historian who takes pictures of archival materials, and I need robust metadata to keep track of citations and item locations for each image I shoot.

[coraline]

i don't know? i wouldn't be surprised, but i haven't used the keywords feature...

[fengshui.livejournal.com]

I too love lightroom. I have all of my photos on the home server, but I keep the lightroom catalog on the laptop. With this setup, I can see, tag, and reorganize my files all I like when I'm not at home, and it applies the changes when I return. I can also import files into the same catalog but on the local disk when traveling, and then move them into the master directory when I get home.

Add to that virtual copies, non-destructive photo editing, and everything else that LR offers, and it's a no-brainer.

It's also fast.

I resisted using it for a while (preferring Adobe Bridge), but I'm very glad I switched. Since Beta 3 is out for testing, I'd play with that and see what you think. You should be able to get a student copy for $100, and possibly less. Estimated release date for LR3 is early 2010.

[sol3.livejournal.com]

The beta runs till april, 2010 (whether or not that's tied to the LR3 release date remains to be seen).

The other thing that I don't use frequently, but have used often enough to make it worth it, is that lightroom, starting with version 2, allows you to export/import catalogs. This means that if you have a small machine you travel with, and want to do photo editing on the fly with, AND a large machine that you do all your heavy lifting on when you get home, you can export your catalog, on the small machine, and re-import it to the large machine's catalog, getting all your edits and such along with it. It's still clunkier than it could be (i'd love to see adobe take a cue from apple's "home sharing" with itunes on this front) - but really insanely useful.

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

Oh WOW. Okay. I would use that. A lot.

[fengshui.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I have sufficient disk space on my laptop (right now) that I just import photos I take while traveling into my main catalog. Once I get home from my trip, I move the photos (in lightroom) from the laptop disk to the home server.

[jojotbird.livejournal.com]

I use lightroom too... the export/import features are nice... I also use some of the plugins so that I can export selected galleries to Smugmug really easily... that way my extensive catalogs are on my laptop, but I can easily filter out subsets to put online and share with my friends :)

[ceo]

I'm also using F-Spot and mostly like it, though it has the usual stability and polish quirks I've come to expect from open-source applications.

I looked at Picasa; their Linux version is simply the Windows version running on the Wine libraries, and they've dropped it entirely in the latest release.

[whynotkay.livejournal.com]

I use picasa, and was delighted when they moved it to the mac so I could use it on my new laptop.

[bolowolf.livejournal.com]

I'm lame and use Photoshop Elements because it was made easily available to me. I don't think it has any of the neat features people have mentioned about Lightroom. But I might go check out Lightroom myself.

Not much help here

[harimad.livejournal.com]

I load them on to my computer then hope one day (month, year, decade) I'll have the time to sort them.

[oddlystrange.livejournal.com]

I mostly use iPhoto for the ease of sharing the photos with everyone else in the world, but yeah, generally its bulky and cumbersome, and doen't think like I do.

Aperture is the same way, I'm currently using it to archive old scans of photos because I can have several libraries at once.

If you're more loosy goosy you might want to consider Adobe Bridge. I use that for all my clip art and stock photography and it's basically a glorified viewer, but nicely cross platform.