Best Photo Management

Some people may be slightly confused on what the difference between photo editing and photo management is. Photo management has to do with keeping your photos organized in such a way that it is easy to find them. Photo editing on the other hand is about the actual editing of the photos. This involves doing simple touch up work on a photo like color manipulation, or very involved work such as completely changing the feel of a photo or adding or subtracting certain elements in the photo. You must have the best photo management system that you can have in order to make good use of good photo editing. This is because your work flow will be so much slower if you always have to find your photos before you can edit them.

Photo management software often has editing capabilities, but the main point of photo management software is to manage the photos, in other words, keep them organized and tidy. Now that we are in the digital age we often have more files and photos to keep straight, so the task of keeping them straight has become increasingly difficult. In the old days, photographers would print out many of their photographs and have them framed, or at least have them laying out somewhere to be viewed. Nowadays this doesn’t happen as much, and we are contained to the computer. It is certainly less messy this way, but it leaves us with the task of keeping track all this information. If you can never find a photo once you’ve taken it, what good was it to take the photo in the first place?

Photo editing software is just as important. Photographers try to do the best they can when they take photos, but it’s very rare to take the perfect shot right out of the camera. Almost all photographs can benefit from a little post-processing. Post-processing is the act of editing a photo after the photo shoot. Thus the name “post-processing”. Photoshop is the most used and most trusted software for photo editing and is extremely powerful. The limit to what you can do is almost unknown. You can do almost anything you want if you have enough knowledge of how the program works. This can take a lot of studying and entire college level courses are devoted to Photoshop alone.

If you want a program that is adept at both photo editing and photo management, check out my post on Adobe Lightroom. I believe it is the best photo management application available, and is also very good at photo editing. I hope this article has been helpful at understanding the difference between the two.

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If you don’t have enough money to buy one of the best photo management applications, then you are going to want to have an alternative way to manage your photos. It’s great that you don’t have to spend a lot of money to do photo management, but you have to keep in mind that it won’t be as easy and it will take more time. It’s also not going to be as efficient as there is a reason why the best photo management programs cost a couple hundred dollars! This isn’t to say that you can’t get it done with little to no cash, however.

First off, if you use a Mac, try using iPhoto, the program that comes with the operating system. It’s free to use and it does a good job of organizing your photos. It even has a few very limited photo editing options. Another application that you can use is Picasa 3. This is an application from Google that allows you to organize your photos efficiently. You can also edit and share them. This program is built both for Windows and Mac. One great thing about Picasa is that it won’t move any of your photos on your hard drive. It will show you where they are stored, and just keep them there. This is great because if your photos get moved all around then it may become hard for you to locate them in the future. The same is true for editing photos. It has a “hands off” approach and will always ask to create a separate copy to edit instead of altering the original.

If you are a Windows user, I suggest that you use Picasa for the same reasons as I outlined above. Picasa 3 is free and is by far the best photo management application available at this price range. As a side note, Windows users may be interested in registry cleaners, as it is a very useful piece of software that can help protect your computer from harm. In the photo business, you want to do everything you can to protect your computer.

Another important thing to mention is how you create your folders on your desktop, as that is the main point of this article anyways! It’s very important that you create these folders with intelligence and intentionality. There are many ways to organize the photos, but you need to pick one method and stick with it. If you are continuously changing up your methods, you’ll soon find it’s almost impossible to decipher what goes where. One method that many people use is simply chronological order. This is probably the easiest method. You can create a folder for each month and put your photos from that month in that photo. If you take a lot of photos, you can add subfolders in there for weeks or even days. Another method is to organize your photos by event or type of photo. You could have folders for sports, family, vacations, etc. This can get messy if you have too many, so be sure that this method actually works for you.

All that to say, there are many methods available to you and the best photo management system is definitely to make sure that you stay organized. The software that you use is only part of it.

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