Software designed to organise large collections of photos using an internal database that speeds up searches and lets you create ‘virtual’ albums and smart albums without actually having to move images on your hard disk. Adobe Lightroom is a good example, using a database ‘catalog’ to organise search and display images. Cataloguing software is more complex and powerful than image ‘browsers’ like Adobe Bridge, which simply show you the contents of folders on your computer.
See Cataloguing software explained for more.
Verdict: 2.5 stars ACDSee Photo Studio for Mac 8 is the MacOS version of ACDSee’s all-in-one Photo Studio application. From its features, it looks like a strong rival to Lightroom or ON1 Photo RAW, for example, but the reality is very different. It’s both basic and technical at the same time, it’s missing features many might take for granted, and it looks like a Windows program ported on to the Mac, even if it isn’t.
Lightroom vs Photoshop, which is best? It’s not that simple, as anyone who uses them will know, because although there is some crossover (well, a lot of crossover), they have very different roles and very different strengths and weaknesses. One is not better than the other because it depends on what you want to do….
Metadata is image information stored alongside or within a photo. You don’t see it in the image, but it can be read by different software applications to help filter, sort, search or identify images.
Choosing the best image editing software can be complicated. It all depends on what you look for most in your photo editing software. Here are 12 programs with their own distinct strengths.
Verdict: 4.5 stars Exposure X7 is a great all-in-one program for cataloguing your images, enhancing and retouching them and adding a huge range of evocative analog film effects
What is the best way to organise your images in cataloguing software? You can use folders, albums, keywords, ratings, color labels, flags… but you should use just what you need. You don’t have to use them ALL.
If you are anything like me and you don’t cull your images, you risk drowning in a sea of duplicates, RAW+JPEG pairs, half-finished experiments, virtual copies and images that were probably not worth shooting but you never got rid of. It’s only when you get rid of all the images that AREN’T contributing anything that you can really start to work on those that ARE.
Culling your photos after a shoot is the only way isolate your best shots and get rid of the clutter. But does culling anxiety get in the way? If you can’t bring yourself to delete any photo, JUST IN CASE, here’s what you can do about it.
Could Capture One be the new Aperture? Like Aperture, it can create fully managed catalogs, which means all your images are stored within a single, monolithic catalog file. It sounds like madness… but is it?
Traditional photo editing is ‘destructive’. That means every adjustment you make permanently changes the pixels in the photo and there’s no way back unless you’ve saved a copy of the original and you’re willing to start again. ‘Non-destructive’ editing is fully reversible. You can go back and undo or redo all of your editing work at any point in the future. Naturally, there’s a catch