Image organizer

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DigiKam, an image organizer DigiKam 7.6.0 screenshot.png
DigiKam, an image organizer

An image organizer or image management application is application software for organising digital images. [1] [2] It is a kind of desktop organizer software application.

Contents

Image organizer software focuses on handling large numbers of images. In contrast to an image viewer, an image organizer can edit image tags and can often upload files to on-line hosting pages. Enterprises may use Digital Asset Management (DAM) solutions to manage larger and broader amounts of digital media.

Some programs that come with desktop environments, such as gThumb (GNOME) and digiKam (KDE) were originally simple image viewers, and have evolved into image organizers.

Common image organizers features

Not so common, or differentiating features

Two categories of image organizers

Many commercial image organizers offer both automatic and manual image organization features. A comparison of image viewers reveals that many free software packages are available that offer most of the organization features available in commercial software.

Future of image organization

There are several imminent advances anticipated in the image organization domain which may soon allow widespread automatic assignment of keywords or image clustering based on image content: [4]

In general, these methods either:

Notable image organizers

NameOSTypeLicense Metadata Geotagging Facial
recognition
Map displaySynchronizes
with online
library
Notes
ACDSee Windows Proprietary Yes IPTC Exif XMP YesYesYes ≤ 25 GB to ACDSee online, flickr, SmugMug,

and Zenfolio

Supports: >100 file formats, Unicode, batch processing, viewing contents of archives formats, non-destructive editing, DB export, R/W to CD, VCD, DVD. Contains: SMTP email client, FTP transport, duplicate file finder.
Adobe Photoshop Album Windows and macOS Proprietary YesNoNoThis product has been discontinued.
Adobe Photoshop Elements Organizer Windows and macOS Proprietary Yes Exif IPTC XMP YesYesYes Flickr, Vimeo, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Email Component of Adobe Photoshop Elements. Also supports management and sharing of video clips.
Aperture (Apple) macOS local database Proprietary Yes Exif IPTC XMP YesYesYes iCloud, Flickr, Facebook, SmugMug Discontinued, but still working on current OS
CodedColor PhotoStudio Pro Windows Proprietary Yes IPTC NoNo
DBGallery Windows Cloud and On-premise Proprietary Yes IPTC Exif XMP YesNoYesNoTeam features such as version control and activity logging. Support for very large collections (millions). Accessed using web browsers.
digiKam KDE (Linux, macOS, Windows) GPL Yes IPTC Exif XMP YesYesYesYes

23hq, Facebook, Flickr, Gallery2, Piwigo, SmugMug.

Image management application database, deals with collections of 100,000's of photos
FastStone Image Viewer Windows Freeware Yes Exif
Fotostation Windows, macOS Proprietary YesNo
F-Spot Unix GPL Yesdiscontinued in 2017
Geeqie Unix GPL YesYesNoYesNo
Google Photos iOS, Android and Web Freeware Yes IPTC YesYesNoYesIntegrated with Google online tool suite.
gThumb Unix GPL YesNoYes
iPhoto macOS local database Proprietary YesYesYesYesYesAs of April 2015, this product has been discontinued. Superseded by Photos (Apple).
KPhotoAlbum Unix GPL YesYesNo *YesNo* Has an option to tag faces on photo manually
Lightroom CC Windows, macOS, iOS, Android and Web cloud-based database Proprietary YesNoNoYesnot compatible with Lightroom Classic CC [10]
Lightroom Classic CC (LR 7) Windows and macOS catalogue-managed local folders Proprietary Yes IPTC Exif XMP YesYesYes PicasaWeb, Flickr, Piwigo, SmugMug with

plugins

Professional image management application database, asynchronously catalog DVD collections of 10,000's of photos. Has built-in RAW Editor that allows to edit RAW images in batch
Phase One Media Pro Windows and macOS Proprietary Yes IPTC Exif XMP NoNoNoPhase One Media Pro (discontinued) was a professional photo manager that makes it easy to manage both photo and video assets. Supports over 100 file formats. Asynchronously manage, add keywords and ratings to catalog with up to 500.000 photos.
Photos (Apple) macOS, iOS and Web cloud-based database Proprietary YesNoYesYesYesDefault photo manager for macOS, iOS, tvOS, watchOS. Supports editing, iCloud, printing, sharing, searching.
Microsoft Photos Windows 8 and later Freeware NoYesNoNoDefault photo manager for Windows 8 and later.
Picasa/PicasaWeb Windows, macOS and Linux Freeware Yes IPTC YesYesYes (per folder)Yes (PicasaWeb only)1 GB free online storage, integrated with Google online tool suite. Discontinued March 2016.
PicaJet Windows Proprietary Yes Exif IPTC XMP Yes Flickr, Fotki.com Multi-user database access, unlimited category-nesting levels, hiding private images, supports for more than 60 image file formats
Shotwell Linux LGPL Yes Exif IPTC XMP NoNoNoYes Facebook, Flickr, PicasaWeb, Piwigo non-destructive editing, one-click autoenhance
Shutterfly Studio Windows Freeware Yes
ViewMinder Windows XP and 2000 Proprietary Discontinued in 2007
Windows Photo Gallery Windows 10, Windows 8, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008 R2 Proprietary Yes IPTC Exif XMP YesYesYes OneDrive, Facebook, Flickr, Inkubook plus more with pluginsOneDrive offers 15 GB of free online storage (and extra 15 GB if automatic photo upload from smartphone is enabled). The latest version of the suite drops the Windows Live portion of the name and is no longer compatible with Windows XP or Windows Vista. Discontinued in 2017.
XnView Windows and Unix-like Freeware Yes IPTC Exif
Zoner Photo Studio Windows Proprietary Yes Exif IPTC XMP YesNoUsing HTML templates
Digital Photo Professional Windows Proprietary

See also

Related Research Articles

CodedColor is a bitmap graphics editor and image organizer for computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system, and is published by 1STEIN.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Exif</span> Metadata standard in digital images

Exchangeable image file format is a standard that specifies formats for images, sound, and ancillary tags used by digital cameras, scanners and other systems handling image and sound files recorded by digital cameras. The specification uses the following existing encoding formats with the addition of specific metadata tags: JPEG lossy coding for compressed image files, TIFF Rev. 6.0 for uncompressed image files, and RIFF WAV for audio files. It does not support JPEG 2000 or GIF encoded images.

An image retrieval system is a computer system used for browsing, searching and retrieving images from a large database of digital images. Most traditional and common methods of image retrieval utilize some method of adding metadata such as captioning, keywords, title or descriptions to the images so that retrieval can be performed over the annotation words. Manual image annotation is time-consuming, laborious and expensive; to address this, there has been a large amount of research done on automatic image annotation. Additionally, the increase in social web applications and the semantic web have inspired the development of several web-based image annotation tools.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">File Explorer</span> File manager application that is included with releases of the Microsoft Windows operating system

File Explorer, previously known as Windows Explorer, is a file manager application and default desktop environment that is included with releases of the Microsoft Windows operating system from Windows 95 onwards. It provides a graphical user interface for accessing the file systems, as well as user interface elements such as the taskbar and desktop.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Image viewer</span>

An image viewer or image browser is a computer program that can display stored graphical images; it can often handle various graphics file formats. Such software usually renders the image according to properties of the display such as color depth, display resolution, and color profile.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Picasa</span> Image organizer and image viewer (2002–2016)

Picasa was a cross-platform image organizer and image viewer for organizing and editing digital photos, integrated with a now defunct photo-sharing website, originally created by a company named Lifescape in 2002. "Picasa" is a blend of the name of Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, the word casa and "pic" for pictures.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tag (metadata)</span> Keyword assigned to information

In information systems, a tag is a keyword or term assigned to a piece of information. This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching. Tags are generally chosen informally and personally by the item's creator or by its viewer, depending on the system, although they may also be chosen from a controlled vocabulary.

Desktop organizer software applications are applications that automatically create useful organizational structures from desktop content from heterogeneous types of content including email, files, contacts, companies, RSS news feeds, photos, music and chat sessions. The organization is based on a combination of automated scanning of metadata similar to data mining and manual tagging of content. The metadata stored in applications is correlated based on a structure for the data type handled by the organizer tool. For example, the email address of a sender of an email allows the email to be filed in a virtual folder for the author and company the author works for or a music file is filed by the musician and album label. The resulting visualization simplifies use of desktop content to navigate, search, and use related information stored on the desktop computer. The data in desktop organizer tools is normally stored in a database rather than the computer's file system in order to produce virtual folders where the same item can appear in multiple folders to the user based on its relationship to the folder.

digiKam Free image organizer

digiKam is a free and open-source image organizer and tag editor written in C++ using the KDE Frameworks.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">F-Spot</span>

F-Spot is a image organizer, designed to provide personal photo management for the GNOME desktop environment. The name is a play on the word F-Stop.

In computing, a virtual folder generally denotes an organizing principle for files that is not dependent on location in a hierarchical directory tree. Instead, it consists of software that coalesces results from a data store, which may be a database or a custom index, and presents them visually in the format in which folder views are presented. A virtual folder can be thought of as a view that lists all files tagged with a certain tag, and thus a simulation of a folder whose dynamic contents can be assembled on the fly, when requested. It is related in concept to several other topics in computer science, with names including saved search, saved query, and filtering.

The Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) is an ISO standard, originally created by Adobe Systems Inc., for the creation, processing and interchange of standardized and custom metadata for digital documents and data sets.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aperture (software)</span> Image organizer for macOS

Aperture is a discontinued professional image organizer and editor developed by Apple between 2005 and 2015 for the Mac, as a professional alternative to iPhoto.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Adobe Lightroom</span> Photo editing and management software

Adobe Lightroom is an image organization and image processing software developed by Adobe as part of the Creative Cloud subscription family. It is supported on Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and tvOS. Its primary uses include importing, saving, viewing, organizing, tagging, editing, and sharing large numbers of digital images. Lightroom's editing functions include white balance, presence, tone, tone curve, HSL, color grading, detail, lens corrections, and calibration manipulation, as well as transformation, spot removal, red eye correction, graduated filters, radial filters, and adjustment brushing. The name of the software is based on darkrooms used for processing light-sensitive photographic materials.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Windows Photo Gallery</span> Discontinued image organizer, photo editor and photo sharing program

Windows Photo Gallery is a discontinued image organizer, photo editor and photo sharing program. It is a part of Microsoft's Windows Essentials software suite. The product has been unavailable for download since January 10, 2017, as the Windows Essentials line of products have been discontinued.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">FastPictureViewer</span>

FastPictureViewer is a freemium image viewer for Windows XP and later. Its aim is to facilitate quick review, rating and annotation of large quantities of digital images in the early steps of the digital workflow, with an emphasis on simplicity and speed. As an app with a freemium license, a basic version is available cost-free for personal, non-profit or educational uses, while a commercial license is required for the professional version with additional features. The basic version starts as a full version trial.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Metadata</span> Data about data

Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Picture Motion Browser</span>

Picture Motion Browser (PMB) is a software application from Sony for organizing and editing digital photos. In 2012, PMB was succeeded by Sony's PlayMemories Home.

PicaJet is a digital photo organizer software. Photos, located in various places on hard drives, can be located by date, category, rating or other user-defined custom criterion. PicaJet can assign images to categories without limitations to category nesting levels.

References

  1. Cynthia Baron and Daniel Peck, The Little Digital Camera Book, July 1, 2002 pp:93
  2. Julie Adair King, Shoot Like a Pro! Digital Photography July 28, 2003 pp:21-23
  3. "Who’s got the tag? Database truth versus file truth" by Jon Udell 2007
  4. http://www.oreillynet.com/digitalmedia/blog/2007/03/lightroom_and_the_future_of_or.html Lightroom and the future of organizing photos
  5. http://www.ctr.columbia.edu/~jrsmith/html/pubs/PAMI/pami_final_1.html Archived 2008-03-13 at the Wayback Machine Automated Image Retrieval Using Color and Texture (1995)
  6. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1232330.1232374&coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE Content-based object organization for efficient image retrieval in image databases (2006)
  7. http://hcil.cs.umd.edu/trs/2004-15/2004-15.pdf Semi-Automatic Image Annotation Using Event and Torso Identification
  8. http://www.ercim.org/publication/Ercim_News/enw62/wilcox.html Managing Digital Photo Collections
  9. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=957093 Temporal event clustering for digital photo collections
  10. "Migrate photos and videos from Lightroom Classic CC to Lightroom CC". helpx.adobe.com. Retrieved 2017-11-30.

Further reading