Best photo organizer for Windows 10.

Hi, I’ve been using Mac since System 7 and I don’t know much about Windows 10.

i have over 200k family photos and 100s hrs of home videos.

i checked reddit, Facebook, google, I can’t find anything.

I use CC for photo editing so I don’t need anything crazy.

i do not like using Bridge for organizing.

is there anything that looks like Apple Photos?

thank you.

pd, even if I have to pay.

PabloSRT8 said:

Hi, I’ve been using Mac since System 7 and I don’t know much about Windows 10.

i have over 200k family photos and 100s hrs of home videos.

i checked reddit, Facebook, google, I can’t find anything.

I use CC for photo editing so I don’t need anything crazy.

i do not like using Bridge for organizing.

is there anything that looks like Apple Photos?

thank you.

pd, even if I have to pay.

Click to expand...

I don't know what Apple Photos looks like. But you could try Lightroom, that was its initial purpose.

iPhoto is a simple viewer with minimal editing.

i can scroll though 200k pics and videos from top to bottom, and double click on any at any time.

print or search by date also available.

when I tried Lightroom, it looked like it was putting them on folders like windows explorer.

can Lightroom handle 200k plus photos And videos to scroll through?



Thank you!!

Have a look at Photo Supreme. It’s a DAM and not a file manager like Bridge is.

Picasa and Digikam are probably the best free options. Picasa is no longer supported though.

ACDSee Photo Studio Home may meet your needs and it is inexpensive.

Both PhotoSupreme and iMatch are great. As mentioned, look at ACDsee. All have trials so find the one you like the best.

So, your issue is the same as mine was/is. I used Win before, then Mac, now back to Win over a decade. I actually haven't found a simple and decent enough solution.

I have my pro stuff that everything is under, but it's a bit of a hassle when I just want to show some relatives or friends some photos.

Win10 files app just, well it's not good let's just say that. Even with my Xeon Mini-Beast rig it's slow. Picasa disappeared, which was a shame because it was simple enough and worked for "non-pro" stuff I did. ACDSee is pretty similar to Picasa, but it's also way more complicated.

I used to star photos within the files app and Picasa would pick it up or if I starred within Picasa it would reflect within the files app. I also made albums which made it easy to show friends some pictures and not all 2000 from Greece.

Now I have a meticulous folder system so i don't really need any "organizer".

C:\Pictures\Year\Year_Month_Date_Camera_Description\DSC000.JPG etc

(It makes backup easy, just copy paste and I'm not dependent on any company to access my pictures. It also makes it easier to jump from system to system. But that's another story)

But the problem is each folder has too many pictures. It's not possible to create albums within a folder or over several folders. So when you open the folder, it's everything.

The closest I have found is actually ACDSee, but it's complex and doesn't look good. Elements Organizer is also ok'ish, but looks bad also and has propriety Adobe stuff that I don't like. And yes, it is better if it looks good.

WHAT I would actually love, is an pro grade organizer that has a "Basic" tab for JUST viewing photos that I that actually looked good (ie not Photo-nerdy"). But alas....

It's ACDSee or FastStone (which looks Win95). I haven't tried XnView but pretty much the same as FastStone.

Sebastian Cohen said:

So, your issue is the same as mine was/is. I used Win before, then Mac, now back to Win over a decade. I actually haven't found a simple and decent enough solution.

Click to expand...

Ha ha... I am in the same boat. Long time Windows user (and DOS before that) but have been on Mac the past 10 years and have just gone back to Windows.

My photos are in folders and I want to keep them there. I didn't use Apple Photos as I didn't want everything sucked into a database. I just want something to view the photos and be able to tag them. I would also like to be able to sort them to see how many were taken with a specific lens or specific focal length.

I've spent some time on Google and just discovered a new app named Image Ranger that looks simple. There is a trial so I am going to give it a try. https://imageranger.com/

--
Pete

PabloSRT8 said:

Hi, I’ve been using Mac since System 7 and I don’t know much about Windows 10.

i have over 200k family photos and 100s hrs of home videos.

i checked reddit, Facebook, google, I can’t find anything.

I use CC for photo editing so I don’t need anything crazy.

i do not like using Bridge for organizing.

is there anything that looks like Apple Photos?

thank you.

pd, even if I have to pay.

Click to expand...

Lightroom was designed for that. It's a great tool. I'm running the version 6 because I refuse to support their subscription model. [I kick myself for recommending it because of their pricing structure.]

There are other programs out there but buyer beware, just because a program says it supports tagging and rating photos and searching on tags and ratings DOESN'T MEAN that the program will update the photo file with them. You'll only find this out the hard way because most people don't know without thorough testing with EXIFTOOL.

FastStone is one of those programs that fails that test. FastStone is an excellent viewer but it lulls you into thinking that it can do other things as well and it's only later that you find out it is not behaving according to industry standards.

Picasa was hands down the best photo viewer to ever exist. You could keep your photos in any folder structure you wanted. You could move your photos around or delete them and Picasa would automatically update. You just got a clean, perfect photo collection that you could group into albums, tag, label, rate, etc. And it was easy to right click and open in any editor you wanted. I would pay a lot of money for a 2020 refresh to Picasa, not that it will ever happen.

All the other photo organizers/viewers either maintain rigid file system organization into folders and files, or they require the use of a catalog with all its headaches. If you are using Lightroom and ACDSee and have the audacity to move or delete a file using the file system explorer, the programs can't handle it.

Apple photos is nice to look at, and has some nice search and album features, but it sucks all your photos into some secret database file and you can no longer manage the files individually. I don't want all my files to be hidden from me.

tkbslc said:

Picasa was hands down the best photo viewer to ever exist. You could keep your photos in any folder structure you wanted. You could move your photos around or delete them and Picasa would automatically update. You just got a clean, perfect photo collection that you could group into albums, tag, label, rate, etc. And it was easy to right click and open in any editor you wanted. I would pay a lot of money for a 2020 refresh to Picasa, not that it will ever happen.

Click to expand...

I've just put an old, c2013, copy of picasa (3.9.10.4) on my Win10 install so it'll be interesting to see how I get on. What I'll be looking at his whether there is any way I can get the face indentification database into the install. I suspect I'm going to suffer by not having maintained a similar folder structure.

I did love having an on-line synced folder, so right click, add to folder and there it was on-line for my friends/family to see.

One thing I find quite interesting and which is new, is Excire Photo. It uses a neuronal network trained image recognizing analyzer that can recognize a lot of things on your photos (woman, car, face, girl, child, low contrast etc) and uses that as tags for the photos, so you get an automatically nicely tagged library you can easily search. It's not perfect and sometimes misses, but is really astounding.

Can be found at https://www.excire.com/en/

Just use Lightroom since you have the subscription. Ensure you change files / folder names from within Lightroom else it will lose track of your imported photos.

Thank you for your replay.

Now I see how good iPhoto actually is.

slideshows, face recognition, some editing, auto arranging by location, etc...

I just can’t believe that Windows doesn’t have something simple and powerful.

Right now I have my Mac external drive plugged in though usb 3.0 to my Windows.

Because Windows can’t real Mac Journaled, I have to use HFSExplorer and extract each folder to my D/photos folder.

its taking forever! Each folder is about 160gb, I have 20 folders, about 3.5tb of raw photos and videos to transfer.

each folder takes about 1.5 to 2 hours to transfer.

i hope that folder can handle my 150k photos and videos...

then I’ll have to organize somehow.

I like it!

i mean, I like the way it looks, I will try it. It looks very clean.

do you think it can handle 100s of thousands of pictures?

Mac I Photo’s was 250k limit, now Mac Photos claims 1 million limit.



I have under 200k but I have kids and it keeps growing.

thanks!!

I tried using lightroom years ago but it looked like it couldn’t handle too many photos.

i have under 200k photos, can it handle that now?

does do face recognition and slideshows?

can I put my videos there too?

im looking for something simple like Mac Photos.

thank you!

PabloSRT8 said:

I like it!

i mean, I like the way it looks, I will try it. It looks very clean.

do you think it can handle 100s of thousands of pictures?

Mac I Photo’s was 250k limit, now Mac Photos claims 1 million limit.

I have under 200k but I have kids and it keeps growing.

thanks!!

Click to expand...

I don't know, but it would be quite interesting to see. I guess any manager will initially be quite loaded, when they have to start databasing so many pictures. And the analysis by the AI will take its time, but it will be fascinating to see what tags it comes up with (some will be wrong).

LR can easily handle your photo volume. I have over 250K photos in one of my LR catalogs and from posts here there are folks with much larger catalogs. Performance on the current version of LR is excellent.

Yes it does slideshows

Yes it does facial recognition

If you have existing directories, you can add them to LR using its Add Folder feature so that it does not create new directories, just catalogs existing ones,

Whatever you choose, download a trial version and try it out yourself, best way to find out if it works for you.

PabloSRT8 said:

I like it!

i mean, I like the way it looks, I will try it. It looks very clean.

do you think it can handle 100s of thousands of pictures?

Mac I Photo’s was 250k limit, now Mac Photos claims 1 million limit.

I have under 200k but I have kids and it keeps growing.

thanks!!

Click to expand...

You really should try deleting some pictures. There is just no possible way that all those 200K pictures are quality photos or meaningful. The more average or bad pictures you keep in your library, the less you can appreciate the really good ones. I'd bet you could delete 4 out of 5 photos and actually have a better photo collection.

tkbslc said:

Picasa was hands down the best photo viewer to ever exist. You could keep your photos in any folder structure you wanted. You could move your photos around or delete them and Picasa would automatically update. You just got a clean, perfect photo collection that you could group into albums, tag, label, rate, etc. And it was easy to right click and open in any editor you wanted. I would pay a lot of money for a 2020 refresh to Picasa, not that it will ever happen.

Click to expand...

I started with Picasa 15 years ago and it is still 100% reliable, the best viewer/ cataloger and very user friendly. Just not with the times. I too would gladly pay for a 2020 version if they didn't change any thing. Oh, I have that already and for free.

tkbslc said:

All the other photo organizers/viewers either maintain rigid file system organization into folders and files, or they require the use of a catalog with all its headaches. If you are using Lightroom and ACDSee and have the audacity to move or delete a file using the file system explorer, the programs can't handle it.

Apple photos is nice to look at, and has some nice search and album features, but it sucks all your photos into some secret database file and you can no longer manage the files individually. I don't want all my files to be hidden from me.

Click to expand...