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

[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 :)