Photo management software

How we test

Photo management is largely about ease of use – the more photos you have, the harder it can be to maintain your picture albums, so good software should make managing your photos a breeze. We look at the initial setup of each program, its inbuilt help information including wizards, how easy it is to organise images, and tools for sharing. As computers allow for easy image editing, most photo management packages also come with basic editing functionality. We test this too, performing common functions like cropping, resizing, and red eye removal.

For each package we import a collection of standard images that a typical user may have, including landscape, family happy snaps and portraits (with red eye and without). We split these into three separate collections and then: 

• Rename the collections.
• Batch change the keyword/tag of each collection.
• Crop two images to 1600 x 1200 pixels.
• Resize an image to 1024 x 768 pixels.
• Use red eye reduction on a test image.
• Rotate an image 90 degrees clockwise.
• Batch auto-correct the test collection of images
• Apply a batch image filter (black and white) to the whole collection.

Mac and Linux

Although the test focused on photo management packages for Windows, we wanted to see how well Apple and Linux offerings compare too, so we included Apple’s iPhoto (Mac) and Yorba’s Shotwell (Linux).
While iPhoto comes as part of the $69 iLife Suite or by itself for $17 from the online Mac App Store, it is also free with any Mac and therefore dominates this category on the Mac platform.
For Linux, while there a range of open-source packages to choose from, we included Yorba’s Shotwell digital photo organiser as it comes bundled with Ubuntu 10.10 and Fedora 14, two of the most popular versions of Linux.