Digital photo album software
A digital photo album software is a database. A software to organize your digital photos.
The look of a digital photo album may be similar to the look of an image viewer software.
The difference is that an image viewer software will show you the thumbnails of all the images that are stored in a given folder,
while a photo album software will show thumbnails of images you did regroup, but that are not necessarily stored in the same folder.
With a photo album software, you can store a
description of each photo, you may attach keywords to each photo,
the EXIF data may be extracted from the image files and put into the database.
Later you will search for keywords or for descriptions where a given word or sentence appears.
Thanks to such search abilities, you will be able to find again a given photo or group of photos easily.
A digital photo album software may either store the text fields only (description etc related to the photo)
or also the thumbnails or even the full-sized photos too.
A photo album software that stores the full sized photos in the database will create a huge huge database file.
The only advantage is that you can delete the former image files because the complete images are now in the database.
Personally I think that it is not advisable to manage a large collection of photos this way.
Your database file will quickly reach a size of hundreds of Megabytes and get unmanageable.
If the database file gets corrupt, you may lose all your precious photos.
A photo album software that stores the thumbnails of your photos in the database takes a lot of disk space too.
Its advantage is to be able to show you the thumbnails of photos that are stored on a removable disk like a cdrom,
even if the cdrom is not in the drive.
A digital photo album software that does not store the thumbnails of your photos in the database takes less disk space.
The database files contain only text, your description, keywords and other related information.
It will show you the thumbnails of photos that are stored on a removable disk like a cdrom,
only if the cdrom is in the drive.
PhotoPhilia
is a highly adaptable digital photo album software with a customizable program layout.
You will choose yourself where you want the directory tree, the thumbails and the photo preview to be.
For example you can choose to have the thumbnails on the right half of the screen like most image viewers,
or as a wide strip at the top or the bottom of the screen.
Besides this it has image editor functions, effects to modify images, slide show,
lavish file filter and file search features and shows EXIF info.
The database fields that can be stored with each photo are: comments and many custom fields.
It is not only one of the bests concerning the digital photo album features,
but it is also a great and flexible photo viewer and a versatile image batch processor.
An outstanding product.
AlbumSee
is a software that is fairly different from the other photo album programs.
It opens as a wizard that will guide you to create a slide show file or an album file.
Stored as a photo album, it needs the AlbumSee software to be watched,
but stored as a slide show (an exe file), it can be given to anybody and watched without the AlbumSee software.
With the user friendly wizard you will be able to create, to modifiy or to show the slide shows.
The database field that can be stored with each photo is: description.
PFS Manager is a digital photo album software
that has multiple layouts to display the content of the database.
It shows the EXIF data, includes a photo editing tool where you can correct and modify your photos,
and also includes a photo viewer tool.
The database fields that can be stored with each photo are: keywords, description and many others.
PE-MU or Picture Exhibitor MU
is an image viewer with image editor and database features.
You can select between the (funny) english and the japanese user interface.
Wit PE-MU you can resize, convert, crop, apply an RGB correction, show EXIF info.
The thumbnails are sizeable.
The database fields that can be stored with each photo are:
title, author, copyright, software and description (the name of the description field is etc).
Easy Imager
is an image viewer with convenient image editor and database features.
It is somehow unconventional but user friendly and intuitive.
It is also able to generate web album pages with thumbnails using different templates.
With Easy Imager you can resize images through 9 resampling algorithms , rotate images with antialiasing,
modify the contrast, brightness, hue, saturation and sharpness.
The database fields that can be stored with each photo are:
title, keywords and description.
The Picture Organizer
is a digital photo album software with numerous features and screens and was certainly a quite big project for the developers.
Unfortunately the operation is somehow unconventional.
I did not find it user friendly because I could not get an intuitive feeling for how to do what.
The database fields that can be stored with each photo are: search word, group, priority and description.
