[scottburgess]

Hi,

 

I need to upgrade to better photo file management.  I found there's a lot on the market and all of it has limitations.  Some products I've been glancing at include Lightroom, Bridge w/ Photoshop, Aperture, ACDsee, Photo Director, fotoBiz, StockView, NSCS Pro, and Capture One.  Of these, only Aperture is out due to hardware limitations.  I am open to looking at others.

 

Four things I might *like* to have beyond basic organization:

• I would like to have one integrated system for both film and digital photo management if possible--still trying to finish labeling slides, still have about half my images in film, and would like to have one search engine for the whole mess.
  
• I am intrigued by the Capture One tethered camera control for the 5D III, but not sure if it has substantive advantages over the EOS Utility, which I find useful for macro image stack collecting.
  
• I like the idea of folder overlays, where one can view the collection by date, or by location, or by species, etc...
  
• I would like to be able to edit EXIF data (according to accepted standards).
  

I do my work on a Win7 laptop for tethering, and a dual-boot Win7/Linux desktop for editing, storage and organizing (I do a tiny amount of work in Linux for efficiency; 99% is done in Win7).  I do most of my editing in Photoshop/Nik.  I have three other Win7 machines (one laptop, two desktop) which serve as occasional backups when a system is down.  I do not want my photos in a cloud server.

 

I am still not clear what advantages each management program presents over the others.  Somewhat uniformly all do a relatively weak job in clarifying what advantages their program has in the marketplace, and after a while they all sound alike.  Some are also not terribly clear up front on their licensing arrangements, which I find annoying since I have multiple machines.

 

Which built-in features do you need the most in your workflow?  Automation of backups?  Support for plug-ins?  Editing features of the manager?  Support for business transactions?  What features would you happily do without, especially if you have Photoshop and the Nik suite?  I am especially interested in hearing from anyone who has used more than one photo management program and can explain the important differences between the programs.

 

Please share your thoughts on this.