Keeping track of digital photos

Can anyone recommend a *good* application for keeping track of the masses of digital photos I seem to be acquiring on my laptop ?

I have tried a few album applications, but none of them seem to do what I want. I guess I'm not sure what I want, but one thing would be to trawl through the various directories which seemed like a good idea at the time, eliminate duplicates, stick all the photos in one directory, allow me to annotate them, archive off to CD, etc . . .

Not much really.

I have various applications that can do individual bits of this, but the problem is that I end up with CDs floating around the place, can't remember if I have them on the laptop, copy them back again and end up trying to deduplicate them all a few months later again.

Cheers,

z

If you are using a Mac then iPhoto is a great app for managing, presenting, emailing &homepaging your photo's. I use a Mac at home & its perfect for managing them.

..not sure what is there in the Wintel world though.

ninsaga

Another option might be for you to author your own Video CD photo album. This means you'd be able to scratch all your images on to a CD which you plop into your DVD player and you can watch your piccies on TV. Nice alternative to a photo album. But that, of course, is after the fact.

There's no easy way to organising your photos. You need to sit down and sort them into folders which might describe the event.

[broken link removed] is not bad, and you can download a trial version of it before deciding whether or not to hand over $49...

(Alternatively, you may find a slightly older full version on the installation CD-Rom that ships with HP scanners — if you know anyone with such a beast?)

Dr. M.

PhotoShop Album (by Adobe) is good and not expensive. It does a good job of tracking, annotating, etc
cheers,
Diziet

Thanks for the replies.

I downloaded a few things last night and am currently working through them.

The first one was an application called Stamp which renames all the files based on the date stamp embedded within the file itself (rather than the OS timestamp on the file). It can also dump the renamed files in a flat directory for re-sorting.

This at least makes it easy to get everything back into date order and eliminate duplicates because the filename will be the same (with #001 #002 on the end)

A few complications have come up so far - it seems that a whole batch of my images have no embedded information in them - I don't know if this was something I did, or if the copy process in the photo shop stripped the info, but it means that the timestamp used is the time the file was originally copied to CD. Just makes it harder to de-duplicate, but not impossible.

I will check out some of the suggestions and get back.

z