I like photography. Not only the act of taking photos but the whole workflow including post-processing. As a result I've used lots of different software through the years and this page is meant to share my point of view on the various software solutions that I have either used or come across.

Before I talk about individual packages I thought it would be useful to partition the software into some categories. The categories I'll attempt to talk about are:

a) Photo manipulation programs
b) Meta-data management programs
c) Viewers, Utilities and other

As is often the case these three categories help but are not perfect as today's software has a way of bleeding into across more than just one category, however, in most cases it is still relatively easy to associate a package to one area as their area of expertise.

Photo Manipulation

I remember years ago I got my hands on CorelDraw and thought "wow!" Even as a beginner user I could tell this program had tremendous power, however, Corel lost their way at the same time that Adobe's Photoshop became completely dominant on both PC and Mac platforms. At the top of the stack of photo manipulation programs little has changed, Photoshop is the king. What has changed is that there is now a major market for mainstream consumers and several products have come in to provide software that does 80% of Photoshop but in a way that is easier for beginners to handle. Adobe has their hands in this market as well with Photoshop Elements, others include Ulead's PhotoImpact, Paint Shop Pro, etc.

In my opinion, Adobe is still the way to go here. Elements wins awards regularly for providing a powerful package in a user friendly way and for people who want the additional power there is no substitute for Photoshop (which is what i use).

Meta-data Management

This space is absolutely critical and it bugs me to no end how it so often gets blurred into the photo manipulation space or ignored all together. In effect what this software is for is to allow photographers to manage their photo libraries and insert content into the photos that contextualizes what the photo is about, who it is of, where it was taken, when it was taken, etc. This kind of technology is as old as photography but in the old days this "meta-data" was written in pen on the back of prints. Since that is not available in the digital world and because people are finding that their growing libraries of photos need better management tools than just a directory structure this kind of software is very important.

My very first product in this space was from Adobe and was called "Album". It was pretty to look at, did an ok job of letting you enter data but it was completely proprietary in nature (e.g., descriptions you wrote there were not readable by others and tools that were unaware ran the risk of accidentally overriding this hidden information). Adobe Album was a 1.0 product in most ways and I quickly gave up on it. My first "grown up product" was the little known iMatch. iMatch is written largely by a single developer but it's power for many years was unmatched and it's support for industry meta-data standards was refreshing (IPTC, EXIF, XMP, etc.). It's user interface was always a bit "techy" and clumsy but it is reasonably priced and should still be considered when looking at this space.

I still have iMatch and use it on occation but a few weeks ago I switched to back to an Adobe product: LightRoom. Joy! It is really a huge step forward. In typical Adobe fashion the product looks fantastic but it is much more than skin deep. This product has been very well thought through. The product is still young but it is immediately powerful and I am looking forward to see it develop over the next few years. It manages meta-info, workflow, and even does some top notch manipulation (but it defers and integrates to Photoshop effortlessly for serious stuff).