Over the last few years I have used a number of different programs to manage my images.  None have really seemed to do what I was looking for.   ACDSee came the closest for a number of years, in that it was easy to categorize and the speed of browsing was fairly fast.  In fact I had pretty much settled on using the product, but  when I went to upgrade to version 6, it trashed all my categories and trying to get support turned out to be just one big run around.  They were never able to help me upgrade and keep my existing categories.

So I decided to try some new programs,  over the next couple of years I think I tried almost all of the applications on the market that could fit within my budget.  None really seemed to fit how I liked to work, until last summer that is, and wouldnt you know it I found 2 that provided the features I was looking for;  Microsofts Media Expressions and Adobe Lightroom.  Out of the gate Media Expressions was easy to use and very intuitive, but had one major flaw.  The performance was terrible once I had a couple thousand images cataloged.  It turned out that it was a known issue with NAS storage devices and there was not a suitable work around or fix available.  So I took a harder look at Lightroom.  While it was not as intuitive out of the box, I found once I learned how to work with the application the more and more I liked it.

After using it for a year and upgrading to version 2.3, I don’t know how I would live without it.  Originally I only intended to use it for image management, but find that I do 90% of my editing there now too.  I only jump to Photoshop for a few functions that I dont know how to do in Lightroom.  So after a long search process I think I can finally say that Lightroom is my program of choice for image management.

I have almost all of my images keyworded and organized.  At a minimum I keyword location and subject on all images, since I dont have any desires to sell my work thats probably going to meet the majority of my needs.  While it has been a lot of work to go thru all my images and keyword them, it’s been fun to see some of the images that I haven’t looked at in a long time.

Here are a couple that I liked.