I used to use Photoshop Album 2.0, went to Elements 4.0. Then I got my 30D. And Elements 4 can't handle the RAW images. Plus I would prefer using DPP as a RAW processor because of the picture styles I downloaded from Canon Japan. I didn't want to use Adobe's DNG format - the converter is, well basic with Elements. And I also suffered a major database crash that made me have to reinstall Windows on my machine to allow me to even start Elements! Anyway, I switched to ACDSee Pro thanks to a special price from CompUSA for a download. And it handles the RAW files quite fine. Wondering what everyone else is using.
i have.... digital photo pro 2.2 (came w/ xti) acdsee 9 windows of course picasa 2 mostly i catalog in windows just by using descriptive folder names, because i usually dont rename my images. i use acdsee to view BUT it seems that no program can preview the rebel xti raw files except picasa 2 and digital photo pro (correct me if i'm wrong here) so in that case i use DPP. i liked the concept of picasa but its a bit awkward and i find myself using it less and less. so.....i do most of my stuff just in windows (organizing, anyway) then use acdsee as the viewer.
downloader Pro, a little tricky to get the hang of setting up the parameter scripts but once set works great, set to automaticaly sense a card inserted into reader then loads on its own, from breeze systems breezebrowser, also from breeze to convert raw, i like how the converted images look, and it's lightspeed years ahead of the canon software photoshop elements 3 fpr tweaks, soon to be replaced by photoshop 7, elements doesn't seem to have too many actions available and it's a bit of a workaround each time you want to set up a new action gary
Photoshop Elements 5.0 I loved PE 2 and 4's set up and had catalogued and tagged about 10,000 pages so I gave the PE 5 upgrade a try. Worth it for RAW shooters, as it incorporates support for RAW images, has just about every "critical" feature of Photoshop (at 1/6 the price), and has a ton of new and improved features for consumer users (such as the excellent "make your own galleries" feature that lets you automatically create flash-based picture galleries and instantly upload them to your own web site. It's worth the upgrade
I organize my pics using folders - 1 folder per year, and a subfolder for each "Roll" of pics (leftover term from when I shot film). The "Rolls" are simply numbered sequentially, 1 roll per day. Some rolls are 4 pics long, others are 150. I catalog my photos by creating HTML pages for each roll. I don't really bother with adding searchable keywords or anything fancy, I simply make an index page for each year with a brief description of the contents of each roll. I have several viewing and editing programs. The one I use most often is called FinePix Viewer; it came with my old Fuji digital camera and quickly opens to view whatever pics I want, without saving thumbnails. It also has built-in capability for batch rotating and resizing, making it easy to create thumbnail versions for the HTML pages and to rotate verticals. I also use Photoshop for more elaborate editing and Noise Ninja for noise reduction and JPG compression.
I use ACDSee Pro. It does all the usual stuff, but I really like the calendar feature, where you can see your photos arranged by year, month, or day. For example, you can tell it to show you all your photos from June 15, 2003. There they are. You can relive vacation trips by clicking day by day.
have you had any problems with it crashing...i had to get an external hard drive as it didn't seem to be able to handle my catalog( 10,000+) without crashing every 2 weeks( after i'd edit something it would say it couldn't save an edit then wouldn't do anything till i reinstalled) not sure if it's my little 512 mb ( i should have "plenty" of space according to adobe)or pse5 problem..i got a disc from them thinking maybe it was a bug in the download ( and had downloaded an update around the same time as i got the disc) and it worked for longer but just had the same problem again. i had been saving everything to the external drive except the raw files but the last few weeks i had saved to the internal drive since it takes forever to pull up the external files...but then it crashed so guess i can't do that.
Jann - I haven't had a single crash with it. In fact, your post just drew my attention to the fact it is remarkably stable, IMHO. I'm running it on a P4 2.4 Dual-Core PC with 4 GB Ram, though ... so I'm sure that makes a performance difference. I've got about 10,750 pics now, with about 800 of them being in RAW - so fairly large file sizes ... but PSE5 handles them all rather quickly. I keep all my photos on a local hard drive (350 GB), and I backup my catalog routinely onto a 1 Terabyte HP wireless Media Server. I don't have the minimum system requirements, but I'm guessing 512 MB is the BARE minimum ... and I wouldn't even run just Windows XP on that, let alone advance graphic editing software.
I use Picasa2, Microsoft Office Picture Editor, Neat Image for noise, Microsoft Image Composer, I have ZoomBrowser EX (but don't like it), Jpeg Compress for making pics an upladable size, I hope to get Photoshop Elements soon.
Just a little update on my response... I've since dumped Picassa because I caught it corruption random images from time to time. Thankfully I had full backups. I haven't elected a fulltime replacement yet.
