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]

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.

[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.