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Free and fast picture organizer?

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John.Laninga

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I am going on a 2 week Alaska trip and expect to take lots of images. I'll be using my Olympus EM-1 and shooting RAW + JPEG. Usually, I carry a NEXUS 7 tablet but it doesn't support RAW. I have an old Acer "Aspire One" laptop, running Windows 7. It has an AMD C60 processor running 1.333 Ghz, and 8GB DDR3 memory. But it has 250G of room on the HD, also has a copy of PIE as well as Adobe Elements 10.

My main purpose is for storing my images and making a first cut to delete the usual bad images (of which there will be a lot!). My normal computer is a Mac, I have been away from Windows for 4 years or so.

I think Elements runs pretty slow, PIE seems faster but I was wondering if there was any other freeware that would work better? Your input is much appreciated.

--
= John
http://www.laninga.com
http://www.flickr.com/photos/laninga/sets/
 
Last edited:
John.Laninga said:
I am going on a 2 week Alaska trip and expect to take lots of images. I'll be using my Olympus EM-1 and shooting RAW + JPEG. Usually, I carry a NEXUS 7 tablet but it doesn't support RAW. I have an old Acer "Aspire One" laptop, running Windows 7. It has an AMD C60 processor running 1.333 Ghz, and 8GB DDR3 memory. But it has 250G of room on the HD, also has a copy of PIE as well as Adobe Elements 10.

My main purpose is for storing my images and making a first cut to delete the usual bad images (of which there will be a lot!). My normal computer is a Mac, I have been away from Windows for 4 years or so.

I think Elements runs pretty slow, PIE seems faster but I was wondering if there was any other freeware that would work better? Your input is much appreciated.
Click to expand...
Faststone Image Viewer is very quick and will work on your laptop.

http://www.faststone.org/

As to using your Nexus and it not supporting RAW, you may wish to check out an app called RawDroid from Google Play. I shoot RAW with my Canon DSLR's and G15 point and shoot and regularly view &/or download RAW files on to my Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 8". Without actually downloading files, you can view them on the tablet through a card reader and delete the not so good ones....and then download and save the rest. There is another app called Photo Mate R2 which is a bit more elaborate which I have not tried but the developer regularly participates on the Android Talk forum (part of DPReview). I believe that these apps work on a Nexus tablet but I am not absolutely sure.

Bill
 
FastStone Image Viewer and IrfanView both display jpeg and raw and are free. Pretty low resource, too.
 
Bill: the Nexus does not have a card reader and wireless transfer is too slow, especially RAW. And, I have 32G of memory before system use, so I may be memory limited as well. Hence my old Acer.

Hotdog, thanks for the links. I was aware of them but forgot. I downloaded both and they look like they will work fine.

Thanks, guys!
 
It is fully functional for 7 days and beyond that, it is free but you will have to pay for RAW file support.
 
I searched enough for this this and after many attempts (some not free at all) I settled somewhat to XnView MP.

It is one of the fastest viewers/editors/organizers available and it has much more powerful features for rating, coloring, keywording than FastStone which has just one checkbox (tag) for this. See here for a very quick intro.

It is cross-platform and free. It supports a bunch of formats (more than 500?) and you can configure your heavyweight processing background (Photoshop & Photivo in my case) to open the files from there.

Also, it has a very powerful batch processing and metadata assignment engines which you can use when you want to do a quick job for someone, your site etc.

There are forums there where you can ask for support.
 
FSViewer and especially IrfanView are not really organizers.

The organizing feature of FastStone Viewer (the Tag box) is quite limited. The thumbs are rather small and inflexible for today resolutions IMHO.

OTOH, IrfanView is 99% viewer. It's thumbs module is... ...well... ...let's say rather basic. Again IMHO.
 
Why not use Windows Explorer. It is, after all, a file manager. Or, download the rather superior (and free) Multi Commander - as then you can have side by side panels to compare the file listings and/ or thumbnails. I use this for all management of files and folders for my images. Otherwise - Faststone Image (Photo) Viewer is an excellent way to view and delete and is also free to use.


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multicommander.com
 
Digikam is a nice free option
 
autre_pensee said:
Digikam is a nice free option
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I did not know that a Windows version is available. As is a Mac OS X version.

XnView MP (multi-platform) also runs on Mac OS X.

Has anybody found a good (and recent!) comparison of the multi-platform options? Wikipedia has an article with a huge table of features, but no assessment.
 
Well, digiKam runs on Windows ...but in practice the Windows KDE port (KDE - the GUI library which digiKam uses) was plagued last time when I checked (still is?...) with a sizable quantity of bugs.

Also KDE is big (much bigger than Qt for ex.) and slow compared with other cross-platform libraries (Qt and wxWidgets for example).

In fact, to be sincere, this situation isn't very odd, KDE having a bunch (or too much IMHO) features which were developed with Linux in mind. Hence porting it can be (and it seems that it is) a tedious task, not taking in account that the ports of each platform must be kept more or less in sync with the new versions of each OSes supported (easy for a vast majority of *nixes - not so easy for Windoze et al.)

I had also a negative experience with digiKam on Windows but I wanted to explain all the above in order to make clear that my bad experience doesn't necessarily mean that digiKam codebase has a low quality and/or on *nixes it won't work much better.
 
JohnTh said:
Well, digiKam runs on Windows ...but in practice the Windows KDE port (KDE - the GUI library which digiKam uses) was plagued last time when I checked (still is?...) with a sizable quantity of bugs.

Also KDE is big (much bigger than Qt for ex.) and slow compared with other cross-platform libraries (Qt and wxWidgets for example).

In fact, to be sincere, this situation isn't very odd, KDE having a bunch (or too much IMHO) features which were developed with Linux in mind. Hence porting it can be (and it seems that it is) a tedious task, not taking in account that the ports of each platform must be kept more or less in sync with the new versions of each OSes supported (easy for a vast majority of *nixes - not so easy for Windoze et al.)

I had also a negative experience with digiKam on Windows but I wanted to explain all the above in order to make clear that my bad experience doesn't necessarily mean that digiKam codebase has a low quality and/or on *nixes it won't work much better.
Click to expand...
Thanks for explaining that. I didnt realize porting was suffering from this technical challenges. I use digikam on ubuntu and assumed the experience was the same on windows... my bad.
 
JohnTh said:
others like XnView MP (see the link in one of my previous posts) provide also Regular Expressions/Wildcard Matching as well as Auto Correct features together with advanced keyword tree management functions.
In time, the (bitter) experience taught me that one needs a flexible, top-notch cataloging engine in order to keep the pace with the reality (ever growing number of photos, changing situations leading to changing/merging/splitting (etc.) of categories/keywords, new projects to be covered etc.).
Click to expand...
I'll have to try XnView i didnt know about it. I havent been limited for cataloging by digikam, but i am definitely open minded about it and definitely not saying it is the best :) in my mind its a very descent free option with fairly comprehensive functionality such as raw editing.
 
autre_pensee said:
JohnTh said:
others like XnView MP (see the link in one of my previous posts) provide also Regular Expressions/Wildcard Matching as well as Auto Correct features together with advanced keyword tree management functions.

In time, the (bitter) experience taught me that one needs a flexible, top-notch cataloging engine in order to keep the pace with the reality (ever growing number of photos, changing situations leading to changing/merging/splitting (etc.) of categories/keywords, new projects to be covered etc.).
Click to expand...
I'll have to try XnView i didnt know about it. I havent been limited for cataloging by digikam, but i am definitely open minded about it and definitely not saying it is the best :) in my mind its a very descent free option with fairly comprehensive functionality such as raw editing.
Click to expand...
 
High quality recommendation from hotdog - he is right both are excellent programs and have been around for sometime. They have developed and changed as the technology has developed. Not bad for free programs!

Personally use Faststone - it is lightweight, fast, can do many basic tasks on top of being an excellent viewer and organiser. If you take the time to set it up as you want it is very worthwhile. I know a number of very successful professionals and they have switched to it as it is so easy to use, and you can link your editing very easily to whatever program you care to use.

Its also very good beginners as an organiser and editor if they are struggling with the complexities of the software that is supplied with their camera.
 
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