Elliot Peele

03:42 am - Photo Management

Originally published at Elliot's Blog. You can comment here or there.

I have been toying for awhile with what I want out of the photo management software that I use to process, organize, and publish my photos. My requirements are as follows:

• Good support for tagging or some similar sorting method.
• Storing files on disk by date. Preferably $YEAR/$YEAR-$MONTH-$DAY. This is not a hard requirement, just prefered.
• Good support for Nikon raw files.
• Usable editing interface. This could be another application, but needs to integrate with the management app.
• Handle exporting to both flickr and gallery2.

I have asked around amongst people I know that have Nikon cameras and have found solutions to this problem that work for them. The each recommended different software:

• Apple Aperture 2 - This is Apple’s proprietary management and editing software. At first glance it looks to have all of the features that I require, along with several plugins that implement more features. I need to do more research and testing to figure out what I think.
• Adobe LightRoom 2 - Adobe’s photo management software, includes some features of PhotoShop. Looks like this probably includes all of the features I need. I still need to take a better look at it.
• Nikon CaptureNX 2 - This is of course targeted at Nikon owners and requires a separate application (ViewNX) for organization and export. My main problem is that ViewNX doesn’t seem to have all of the features that I want. Although from looking around it looks like some people use LightRoom to do there organization and export while using CaptureNX for editing, which isn’t out of the question, but kinda pricey.

Once I have evaluated all three I will post my results.