Best digital photo album?

[PaulAH]

Help, please. I am looking for a digital photo album to replace PhotoRecall, a great little program that is now sadly discontinued. It had a very friendly arrangement of shelves, albums and folders which anyone in the office could use intuitively.

We have around 5,000 industrial images that need to be catalogued and accessed quickly, with associated text fields to store the details.

Does anyone know of a good replacement? It needs to run on Win98 and XP and should preferably have a way of associating Word documents with each image.

Not too demanding, you would have thought. But everything else I've looked at (FlipAlbum, Photoshop Album etc) is weighed down with unnecessary features that will only get in the way.

There must be something out there...
Paul

[Photo-John]

Paul-
There's a ton of stuff available - anything from simple browsers to super sophisticated "asset management" software. Have you looked at the Browser Software Reviews on this site? That would be a good place to start looking. I think your problem is going to be your need to associate Word files. Maybe that's not such a big deal, though. I have no idea. Some of the more popular products are ACDSee, Cerious ThumbsPlus, and Picasa. The most sophisticated software available is probably Extensis Portfolio. It's very powerful and I have no doubt that you can manage your images and Word files together on a network with that package.

I can't recommend one particular products, but I hope that helps. I'd really like to know what you finally decide on. And if you discover software that isn't listed here, please let me know and I'll add it.

Good luck!

[PaulAH]

Wow! I didn't know all those reviews were there. This is very helpful indeed and I thank you, Photo-John.

Have tried several more trial versions and nothing fits the bill. PicaJet wouldn't run with my display adaptor, confirmed as a hopeless case by their support people (the PC isn't that old!), and a couple of others would have been far too complicated for my office staff who just want to find and email pictures quickly without having to go on a week's residential course. One application, billed as easy to use, confronts you with a great table of boolean logic fields. Do us a favour...

Our needs are simple, roughly in this order.
- Store (by thumbnails and links) about 5,000 still images
- Catalogue them by subject for easy reference
- Save information about them in configurable fields
- Free text search on the above
- Email them singly or in batches
- Print singly or in batches
- Associate one or more Word doc with each

For picture editing there's always Photoshop - we don't even need that facility

Not a lot to ask, is it?!!

PhotoRecall was doing the job brilliantly (apart from the Doc associations) until it became incompatible with XP. It also has some shortcomings, eg if you rename the source file you lose the link permanently. Another was that if you forget to generate a thumbnail when importing to an album, there's no way of doing it later without re-importing it and re-inputting all the data - so it's constantly dragging up the original jpeg and converting on the fly (very slow).

But it suited our needs. Why does the IT world insist on making things ever more complicated, with new operating systems that won't talk to old ones and new wonder features for the sake of them, all designed to empty our pockets.

I'll stop now! Thanks again

Paul

[opus]

check out this program, called iView. I don't see it listed on the review pages, but I had it recommended to me by someone on this site.

I'm sorry I have no personal experience with it, and I haven't had time to look at it yet, but if you like it please come back and let me know.

http://www.iview-multimedia.com/index.php