Find the best digital photo viewer and organizer software available

Viewers
Digital photo viewer and organizing is one of the software categories where both the quantity and quality of free software is high, so it does not have to cost you a fortune to get one. One important factor with a digital photo viewer is which image formats the software is capable of reading.

Other important features of a photo viewer software is the possibilities of the basic viewing options as showing thumbnails of all photos, zooming in to view details and see if the image is sharp and in focus. The possibility of rotating images as well as showing them in fullscreen mode is important.

Another nice feature not offered by all viewers is possibilities of reading the images EXIF data. With some viewers you can also export the images to slideshows and even in HTML/Flash format to web pages.

Organizers
For photo organizers the most important features are possibilities of tagging the images with keywords, categories, flags etc. Other important features are possibilities of organizing the images into album and collections. Organizers preferably should have the possibility of resizing and exporting to different external sources as web, e-mail or print.Below is listed some of the most used viewers and organizers.

Adobe Lightroom 1.3

Lightroom is a package aimed at digital photographers with large quantities of images. It is first of all a organizing and library software package with editing capabilities.

Lightroom consist of five modules – library, develop, print, slideshow and web. In the library module you can import images and assign ratings, keywords etc. to them. In the develop module you can edit and make adjustments to the images.

A nice feature is the possibility of creating virtual copies. You can have multiple versions of photos with different adjustment settings to virtual copies of the original photo. Virtual copies don't exist as actual photos so they don’t use any extra hard drive space The virtual copies are metadata in the catalogue that store the different sets of adjustments. You can later export them to real images.

Through the slideshow, print and web modules you can export you finished images in different ways. Lightroom is not cheap; the price is around US$ 300. A new version 2.0 is just released.

Read more about Adobe Lightroom here.

ACDSee PhotoManager 2009



ACDSee Photo Manager 2009 is a digital photo viewer that lets you quickly view and find photos, edit photos, and share your favorites through e-mail, prints and free online albums. You can tag images with your own keywords. Assign images to as many categories as you like without taking up more space on your computer. Rename, rotate and resize groups of photos at once. The cost is US$ 50.

Read more about ACDSee PhotoManager here.

ThumbsPlus 7.0



With ThumbsPlus you can view, edit, print and organize images. A useful batch converter allows complex image manipulations with more than 300 editing functions. ThumbsPlus has easy to use wizards for optimized image and catalogue printing, as well as to create web pages, slide shows and contact sheets. The price is US$ 50. There is a Pro version with RAW support at a price of US$ 90.

Read more about ThumbsPlus here.

PicaJet



Is a powerful digital photo viewer, a fast digital photo management and image database software that will efficiently organize your digital image collection. Interface and navigation is simple and intuitive. If you collection of photos is big few other organizing software packages can handle this more efficient.

Sorting and grouping of the photos is very powerful as well as the search functions. Thanks to full hardware OpenGL acceleration support, you can smoothly zoom in and out of a picture using just a single mouse click. PicaJet can easily resize, convert and rename groups of photos in batch mode. More than 60 file formats including RAW is available.

PicaJet has Fotki and Flickr plugins that are transparently integrated into your photo management process. They automate your image uploading process. All in all this is as very powerful package for its price of US$ 48. There is a free version but the really strong features of Picajet are not included here.

Read more about PicaJet here.

IrfanView 4.2

IrfanView is a very fast, small, compact free digital photo viewer. Some of IrfanView`s features are thumbnail/preview option, slideshow, support for Adobe Photoshop Filters, batch conversion (with image processing).

A nice feature is you can save the slideshows as exe-files. This way the receiver of your slideshow does not need to have the software or install any software on his computer.

IrfanView supports RAW files and there are a lot of plugins to download. I have used IrfanView myself for many years and I like it a lot. It is very fast and my preferred software for batch converting of my images. Resizing before uploading photos to Flickr is quick and easy with this program.

Read more about IrfanView here.

FastStone Image Viewer 3.6



Is a free user-friendly digital photo viewer, converter and editor. Among the features are red-eye removal, emailing, resizing, cropping and colour adjustments. Other features include a high quality magnifier and a slideshow with more than 150 transitional effects, as well as lossless JPEG transitions. It even support the most common RAW file formats.

Read more about FastStone Image Viewer here.

XnView

Is a free software for viewing and converting image files. There is support for more than 400 file formats.

You can do the most important editing as cropping, resizing color adjustments etc. It is also possible to batch convert and rename files. You can create web pages and contact sheets for printing – all very easy to do.

Read more about XnView here.

Photoscape 3.2

Photosuite is a package containing a wide range of tools and features.

It has everything from viewer to a photo editor, slide show creator, batch editor, screen capture program, and more. The program is very capable and has all the important editing features. It is simple to use and very useful for quick fixes. It has a RAW converter implemented.

Read more about Photoscape here.



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