Adobe Lightroom is one of the best photo management tools that are available. At the time of writing, the latest version of Adobe Lightroom is version 2.5. It supports all kinds of RAW images from different cameras, including all the latest. It does take time for the newest cameras to have RAW support added to Lightroom, but it is always added within a few weeks. Because Lightroom has the ability to read RAW images, this gives it an extreme advantage over other software that does not have this capability.

Adobe Lightroom makes photo management easy. When you open it up, the first thing you will notice is that there are customizable tabs all around the screen. On the left is the folder manager. You can add and remove folders here. In the center is the photo display. On the right is information about the photo including the histogram. In develop mode this is also where all the photo editing tools will be located. The top panel is where you can switch modes, from Library, Develop, Slideshow, Print and Web. The feel and options in the program change in each of these modes.

One of the reasons that this is one of the best photo management software options is because of how flexible the application is. You can literally do thousands of things. One of my favorite things is the ability to have more than one library, and even more than one library on one computer. When you load the program, you have the option of automatically loading a library, or, you can have it prompt you to select a library to load. This is what I have done because I have several libraries. It’s great to be able to choose which library to use. Since I do different types of photography, I will load photos from each kind of photography that I do into different libraries. This helps me keep the photos more organized.

Another great part of Adobe Lightroom is the fact that it’s so easy to add information to the metadata. You can add keywords to different photos and then later search by keywords if you want to find specific photos. This is a great option and Lightroom makes it so easy. If you are going to look at other photo management software, be sure to see what kind of metadata editing capabilities it has. It’s also extremely important that Lightroom is able to let you easily search by many different search criteria. For example, you can search by date, camera type, lens type, keywords, folders, attributes and on top of that you can flag photos, create categories and more!

So it’s needless to say, but I believe that Adobe Lightroom is one of the best photo management options. You can’t go wrong with it, and you can buy it from just $199, or in many cases even less.

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