I have experimented with a few photo management software in the past few years, starting with Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0 and ending (for now) with Adobe Lightroom 1.2. Here is a summary of my thoughts on each.
Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0
(Photoshop Album is now part of Adobe Photo Elements and is no longer available by itself.)
I bought my first digital camera, the Canon A80, in 2004 and started looking around for a photo management tool in that same year. I don’t remember how, but I came across Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0 and was happier with it than its competitors at the time. Photoshop Album allowed me to easily tag my photos and view them by dates. Photo adjustments were never made on the original, instead physical copies were made, typically with filenames like ‘Photo1_Edited.jpg’.
So far so good, but I was not happy with how Album would take over the physical photo location management and make it difficult for me to find them on my own. Also I don’t think the tags were embedded in each photo’s EXIF fields. These two issues mean that it would be harder for me to manage my own photos should I decide to ditch Adobe Photoshop Album.
Google Picasa
Ditch Adobe Photoshop Album I did, and I did it quickly enough so I wasn’t deeply attached. I switched to Google Picasa after Google bought the original publisher and released the software for free.
Compared to Photo Album, Picasa offered the same tagging ability but its user interface felt more responsive. What I liked most, though, was that file locations were the same as in file explorer. It was easy to still manage my photos outside of Picasa.
Still, I left Picasa because it didn’t (and still doesn’t as of version 2.5) use EXIF to store tags and other information, so my tagging effort would have been a waste if I ever moved away from Picasa. In addition, Picasa’s editing features were too rudimentary for a ‘budding’ photographers like myself. 
Microsoft Photo Gallery
Earlier this year I upgraded to Windows Vista, and with Vista I started using the bundled application called Photo Gallery. It’s basic, sure, but it did every big thing I wanted. In a way it’s just a more photo-friendly UI on top of File Explorer, so I knew exactly where and how the photos are stored on disk. Tags and information are stored in EXIF and IPTC, so if I wanted to, I could bypass Photo Gallery and still manage my photos without any hiccups.
Original photos are supposedly backup (somewhere) when changes made through Photo Gallery. The program offers ways to revert back to the original should you change your mind. I like the fact that I can view the edited photos even without Photo Gallery, unlike Google Picasa and Adobe Lightroom (below).
Earlier this month Microsoft released another version of Photo Gallery and made it available on Windows XP for the first time. The new version added fancier importing and editing features. Previously the auto correction in Photo Gallery was completely unusable, but the one in the new version is somewhat acceptable.
As much as I like Photo Gallery, I find it a bit too basic at times. As I mentioned earlier, photo correction tools are superb. Also the tagging process can be streamlined.
But hey, Photo Gallery is free. I still use it.
Adobe Lightroom 1.2
About a week ago I was listening to a photography podcast while jogging. Throughout the show I kept hearing references to Adobe Lightroom. Being a software guy and a gadget person, I decided to download the trial and give it a whirl.
Adobe Lightroom is a $299 program, though the download is only around 45mb. It is leaps and bounds beyond Photo Gallery, but then so is the price.
Like Photo Gallery, metadata changes are stored right in the photos themselves in the form of EXIF and IPTC. Keyboard shortcuts are abound, and the workflow is geared towards real photo-heads like unlike myself. There is plenty of photo editing options – not Adobe Photoshop plenty but more-than-Photo-Gallery plenty. Using Lightroom presets, I was able to edit a normal picture of a dog into the ‘antique’ version you see here.
Like Picasa, Lightroom does not directly edit the original photos. Instead Lightroom records your operations and applies them when you view the photos via the program. This is flexible if you are using Lightroom. However, it means you have to export the processed pictures using Lightroom if you ever want to see the above ‘antique’ dog photo outside of Lightroom.
Right now Lightroom is my favorite. I hope I can figure out a better workflow to persist the edited photos.
