Making Image Organizer Software

Why, My Story.
I have been taking photographs for over twenty years first with traditional film cameras, and more recently scanning the negatives with a film scanner, and storing them on my PC.
A little while back I added a digital camera to my collection: Of course, since I have been able to instantaneously upload digital images to my PC, the numbers of image files on my disk is growing exponentially!
I currently have over 6000 image files and they take up 40 gig of space. I keep them on an external USB drive and I regularly back them up to a hard drive on my PC.....
The Problem.
I used to use file browsers for viewing my image collection but found it unbearably slow to view or find any images in a collection of thousands - using a file browser relied on my memory to organise photos - that was never going to work!
I wanted to take control of my image collection:

• I didn't want to rely on system date and time stamps.
• I didn't want to rely on folders
• I didn't even want to be tied to one operating system.

Don't get me wrong, I was already quite organised, I did (and do still) keep stuff in folders, I just didn't want to be limited by them.
I kept losing track when I used old fashioned file browsers, they took too long to view, and typically, the reliance on a directory based structure hampered the way I searched for my pictures
Typically, I kept photos in folders named "holiday2001" or "kids" or similar but it never quite worked because inevitably I would have "kids" or "beach" or "Wales" in the "holiday" folder, and whenever I wanted to find a photo it was murder! I looked around for Image Management software and tried some out.
There is a lot of software out there that professes to manage image storage, but I found that many of them were primarily image editing tools or jazzed up file browsers. Some relied on EXIF, but my habit of using different editing tools put that information at risk! I wanted to use the original EXIF but I wanted my own categories and descriptions.

The Solution
I decided we had to write some Photo Management Software : Now after investing significant effort into this product, I have exactly what I want to organise my Photographs.
It's not a file browser, but I can browse images quickly, its not an image editing tool, but I can easily use my favourite image editing tool with it!
Now I use this Photo Management software - its a breeze -

• its so easy to use,
• it is simple to install and even simpler to setup -
• it took only a couple of minutes from download to working!

Now,

• it's fast to view my pictures,
• it's easy to sort them,
• it's even easier to categorise and re categorise them.

This software gives me all the features I need to keep track of my photos, there, at my fingertips.
It centralises my collections so I can back them up easily along with all the categories and descriptions I added (and soon I will be able to import the EXIF too) all in one go.
My favourite feature is being able to choose to install the software and my pictures on an external USB drive, not only can I view them on both Windows and Linux operating systems, I can also take my disk with me to my friends' houses, plug it into their PC and share my holiday photos.
I already had thousands of pictures sorted into folders on my PC, so I thought it was important to be able to choose to import all of them at the same time - ten seconds and a few clicks later had enabled me to tag each image with the folder names they came from and all I had to do was wait for the import to finish - it even recreated the folder structure. Now theres an option to point at an image repository and use that, just refresh and all the folder names are used as categories.
I have been able to take control of my photo collections for the first time. I can sort by category, description, picture content, image name, (and soon EXIF data) and I can exclude or include any of them in the same way. I can find duplicate images by sorting by thumbnails too!
We use a powerful database and it doesn't rely on EXIF data or file browsers, it is really quick to select files and look at the information against images, I don't have to worry about file names - I just import them "describe" them and enjoy them!
Whether I am viewing thumbnails or selected images, I have full control; I can set the size of the viewed and stored thumbnails to optimise speed of viewing and quality of thumbnail and when I double click I see the full image regardless of the window size! Resizing the window - resizes the Image.
Its so flexible, I can select to view all the pictures in one category (or several categories) and thumb or slide show through them manually or automatically. Completely separate selections of images can be slide showed simultaneously
I'm not tied into using any one image editing tool either. I can zoom in and out on each images from within the software, I can rotate it and save it too, but, if I right click over any picture I can open it in my favourite image editing tool - if I change images and save the image, all I do is refresh!
Currently, we support jpg, TIFF, bmp, png, and gif files. If you have your digital camera set to RAW format, you should convert them to one of the supported formats - I recommend bmps for performance reasons
What Next?
If you have found this article of interest, why not go to
www.believeit.ltd.uk
where you will be able to download a free trial version of the software (limited to organising 10,000 images)
Uninstalling the software will leave your images as they originally were.