Cataloguing. archiving and sorting of images -for PC

I have been lazy. Very lazy. I have several thousand pictures all within subfolders of a folder. All have been storage using either the default folder (usually date related) for either the camera [when directly transferring] or the flashtrax [backup device]. In some case I had the same set of photos backed up from both!

Last night was the straw that broke the camels back. I spent 45 minutes searching for a particular shot of an owl that I knew I wanted to enter into the loca club B&W competition. I couldn't remember when it was taken.

What I want is some software that can trawl through my subdirectories, let me catagorise the images, and then store them accordingly so that I can quickly view them by type [preferably in Rawshooter]. Allowing me to grade them would be good. But, most importantly, this needs to be quick and easy. I don't want to spend the next year's free time devoted to it.

Any suggestions?

Thanks

Daniel

We use MediaPro and it does a pretty good job - it's certainly fast enough. Highly reccomended.

A while ago, though, somebody mentioned that iView had been bought out by Microsoft. If this is really true, then I'm clueless as to what to reccomend - Microsoft has an annoying track record of messing up perfectly good software that they've bought.

All the best, James

iView Multimedia is now Microsoft Expression Media. I don't know what's different about it, now that it's been acquired by Microsoft (other than that I wouldn't count on updated Mac OS versions). You can't even browse its feature list online without installing a piece of software, and they have a bunch of products named "Expression" -- they're hard to differentiate on the website. I browsed around for awhile, and then closed the window.

A lot of people use Extensis Portfolio.

I use Aperture, which -- for me -- provides a good combination of non-destructive editing and cataloging. It's not perfect, yet, but it works well enough that I can find things quickly.

Hi

I've got about 12000 pics indexed through Photoshop Album - which is now part of Photoshop Elements. I'm using v6.0 which is easy, you can create as many categories as you like - and it will search quickly. It'll read RAW - at least it reads by D200 Nikon NEF files no problem.

More a consumer product than prosumer, but it is free: Picasa from Google.

Despite being aimed at simplicity, it does read RAW files, can do basic editing (in a non-destructive manner), has handy features like export to email etc. When you first install it, you point it at the location of the images, or just have it index the whole hard drive.

You may find that no matter what software you use, the creating a retrospective catalogue of your images with categorisation etc. will be the time consuming task, because it's difficult to get around the fact that to achieve this, you need to look at each image (or at best a group of images) then apply keywords / categories as appropriate.