Digital Light & Color

What does everyone use along with PWP for logging photos?

Im using PhoA, a little freeware tool working mostly like a lighttable.
But unfortunately it is not developed further more, so, sooner or later I will have to look for some other solution.

I use IMatch, from www.photools.com. Very powerful database for your entire photo collection, but can be used in a simple manner for small projects, too.

+1 for imatch.
Originally had imatch then lightroom and found the performance unacceptable (memory footprint, cpu/thread utilisation), then photoshop and bridge.
Now I'm back to iMatch (and PWP as a replacement for photoshop) - that journey cost me a lot!
May your journey be simpler and cheaper.
hans

To any one looking for a LR replacement for logging photos I have settled on Zoner Photo Studio. It works off both keywords and the standard windows folder system. Very capable and not expensive, they also have a free version with a few less features....Adios Adobe!

I use BreezeBrowser Pro (bought it years ago) for simple tasks and IMatch for larger projects and for gallery creation.

I really need to organize my mushrooming collection of images and sort through them, and I just discovered a deceptively simple but highly functional media organization software for the Windows platform developed by a British group, called "Diffractor".

It is freeware for non-commercial use, but one can "sponsor" it with a donation, in which case a few more capabilities are unlocked for use. There is also the latest beta at http://www.diffractor.com/DiffractorSetup.Beta.exe. I'm still testing it, but it seems stable enough for regular use.

The 6 minute video at the first quoted link above gives a run-down of its media organization capabilities, which use the metadata in the media files to present many different views--by tags, by location, by equipment, by exposure, by date taken, etc.--and let you easily modify or add to them. It uses/adds/modifies the appropriate EXIF, IPTC and XMP metatdata locations in the files to do this, and maintains a database to speed things up (e.g. when adding a category of metadata to a file, there's a panel with all the currently used tags in that metadata category). There is no need to change your current file organization preferences.

Update: I've since discovered XnView which, while lacking the user interface pizazz of Diffractor and restricted to image files, actually has more metadata editing capabilities in a more conventionally usable interface (and you can save lists of keywords and metadata templates as well). I think I'll use XnView to edit metadata and Diffractor to quickly navigate among files. Both write the kind of IPTC/XMP metatdata that Windows Explorer's search engine seems to index as well, so it's all good.

I've spent some time now to look for "my" solution for organisation.
Testing some programs I finally ended up with Zoner Photo Studio ( thanks to bbodine9 for pointing my nose on it! ).
For me it seems to be the perfect solution, I stick with the free version now, I only use it for organizing and viewing and do all editing in PWP, so I need no RAW support.
ZPS also uses DCRaw as RAW-engine, so the differences should be marginal and I'm used with PWP.

I will put in a plug for Daminion (www.daminion.org). It is purely a digital asset manager. The interface is simple, the cataloguing options are comprehensive and the search capabilities are powerful. A right mouse click on the displayed selected raw image can take me straight to PWP for editing.

Dieter,

A few questions on ZPS:

1) is it portable?
2) does it use external DB or writes to EXIF?
3) What are the limitations of the free version (can it catalogue, search or edit EXIF in RAW files, for instance)?

Cheers!

p.s. Does anyone have an experience with Windows Photo Gallery? What does it do to EXIF - writes to it directly or creates a separate index DB?