Does anybody uses it? Do you recommend it? Do you recommend any competitor with more or less the same feature set?

I just think it is time I get some good tool to manage my photo collection. I want a good and quick photo viewer; I want to tag my photos; do some basic editing if needed; produce slideshows; and possibly have some face recognition feature like Picasa has. I want to be able to nicely and effectively edit exif data, search for it, sort and search pictures based on it, etc.

It seems to me that PS Elements Lightroom is the classic choice, here, but maybe there's another recommended product out there? Or maybe PS Elements is NOT recommended?

Edit 1: I've also been looking at ACDSee, since I used to have it when they had a free version. How is it these days?

Edit 2: I am currently using Picasa for all this, but it is prooving a bit too buggy and feature limited.

Free = Picasa
$$ = Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

That's about all I can recommend at the moment.

I haven't used a recent version of Elements since I have the standard version of Photoshop. However, Photoshop (and at least Elements also used to be) more pixel-based and, IMO, not nearly as useful for photography, especially image management and metadata, as Lightroom.

Oh, I am getting confused, then.
I too have the complete version of PS, and I think I am then confusing Ligthroom with Elements. I'll go and look back at Adobe website.

Ok, yes, I meant Lightroom. Thanks Bruno and sorry for the confusion.

Back to topic, I don't mind spending some money if its worth. I am now downloading the demo...

Yes, check the demo version out. It's a nice way to manage a photo collection, especially a growing one. Its metadata support is robust, however it doesn't have a very good metadata and keyword editing interface. Overall however, I do think it's the best program of its genre.

Ok, I am importing my collection now...

Bruno, do you also use it as your main photo viewer?

And, does it have face recognition?

It does not have face recognition. It also lacks decent GeoTagging support - it can list the coordinates and send you to Google Maps in a web page but that's it - no editing coordinates, no built-in mapping, etc. I would find this more valuable than faces, but these two options are two of my most wanted "non-essential" items.

I can't say I use it as a photo "viewer" unless I know I want to go and work on a specific photo or find a photo. That is to say, I use a number of other programs to quickly look at images of all kinds on a daily basis, however I use lightroom to manage my digital photo library. SO when I'm looking for something or I want to show someone a number of shots, in those cases, I suppose I do use it as my viewer.

Photo collections and photo files are getting bigger all the time, that said, make sure you have a system with decent specs to run Lightroom. I don't find it especially quick on my 2.9GHz Core2Duo MacBook Pro.

Lightroom is an amazing tool, I use it to manage my quickly growing collection of photos. I have to say though that I don't think it's organisational skills are the best, compare it to something like iPhoto and for most consumers that has a much better interface and is much more user friendly.

Lightroom forms part of my structured workflow, and as an image tool it does some really amazing things, the new noise reduction and lens correction features are simply amazing. LR takes hours and hours off my workflow, but I work with large volumes of pictures maybe 1500 at a time, this is what it is designed to do, not catalogue a family photo collection. Although it can do this of course.

I'd look at all the options and find the best one for you, you've made a good choice to start off with but it may not be the right one for you.

Cheers

Cris

... so, I am reading Elements does face recognition. I am confused on Adpbe's line up. Element, as I read on the website, does not really seem to be a subset of Potoshop.

If you're leaning toward Elements, which I do see has some organization now, I would suggest staying FREE with Picasa. Otherwise keep testing Lightroom and I'm sure you'll find that $199 is a decent amount to spend on this type of software.

There really aren't any programs out there for Windows that can compete with Lightroom. If you had a Mac you might like Aperture instead (I don't however, mostly due to its photo/file management style).

I don't mind at all Lightroom. It just misses a face recognition feature, which I find fun. And, for simple daily viewing pictures, you have to use other software. But, that's not a big deal. Windows 7 viewer is basic but ok.

Still, having one single piece of software would be nice.

I am giving another try at ACDSee, which was pretty good a while back, I remember.

The newer version(s) of ACDSee do have some asset management capabilities and I believe some editing features. You could conceivably use it instead of something like Lightroom, but it's an entry-level program and doesn't really offer the growth possibility found in Lightroom.

By the way, you haven't mentioned why you don't (want to) use Picasa? It has asset management, editing, viewing, metadata and facial recognition.

Picasa has one big known bug which has not been resolved for the last year, that is it's viewer executable is not killed when you close it. So, if you want to use it to view pictures, you end up with tens of threads left open. Each will take 5MB RAM circa. It happens on both 32 and 64 bits versions of Windows since XP on, and the net is full of complaints not being addressed, so far.
Consider that my PC gets rebooted only when updates require me to, so basically I end up with tens of dead threads taking each 5 MB of ram...

Also, viewer ins not completely integrated into the rest ofthe software, and moving from one to the other is annoying (I want to be able to see an image full screen, then go back and browse, and it requires way too many clicks. There are other minor things. Essentially, I like it overall but there's some room for improvemente and since I don't mind spending some money on a product to manage my collection and view it, I am hoping something is in fact out there.

Lightroom is very nice, I think, but i lacks the "viewing" part, mostly. And face recognition.

I don't know, I still haven't found something that makes me happy enough to stop searching

Well, the viewing in Lightroom sounds worlds better than Picasa then.

You can double-click an image thumbnail in the Library view to expand it to fill the library area and then use the mouse wheel or keyboard to navigate to the next/previous images. You can easily make the rest of the UI disappear and go full screen on the thumbnails or the current image and have the same navigation. CTRL-SHIFT-F in Windows.

Well, it is better in many ways, but it is not in others. For example, I like to open my files directly from the file system, and in that case it just does not work the way I want, which is the way all viewers work: they bring up the picture on screen. If you open a specific file with lightroom, it opens in import mode.

But yes, if you start lightroom first, then the viewer is not bad at all.

TO elaborate more - and it really depends on your personal preference - what I do is:

I very often browse through my collection by simply using Windows explorer.
When I do, I have it setup in either thumbnail view or detail, and switching between the two is one click.
In detail view, I have focal length, camera name, date taken, lens, and other detail listed, and I can quiclly sort or narrow down the view by date range, focal length or whatever parameter. I find it quite effective and I don't see myself abandoning this basic but effective way to access my photo collection.
Now, when I want to view a picture full screen, Windows photo viewer is just average. Picasa is just as quick, if not quicker. Way nicer in the way it brings up the picture on screen.
But then, there are times, often, when I want to switch from viewing a single picture, to a more advanced tool for more features. So, from the full screen or windows view of a specific picture, I've been used to hit enter or other 1-click methods to start an more advanced application (I got used to this by ACDSee, years ago, and found this same behavior in mosti viewers for Windows, such as Firesone, Irfanview, etc).
Now, this is just not happening with Picasa. You need to start it from scratch EVEN IF you're viewing an image with PicasaViewer (a separate exe in the sw package).
Of course, Lightroom is worse in this specific regard.
Once I am in the "advanced" image manager, I'd like to have all features of a more complete image manager: tagging, creating dynamic collections, face recognition, possibility to create slideshows, EXIF group editing, advanced searching, etc.

Photo editing is not much of a need, since I use Photoshop for that. Of course, rotating and cropping comes very handy in any case.

So, Lightroom seems to have most of it, but it is the fast viewing that just does not match what I like to do. And Picasa is a bit too buggy.

So, not that I can't live with Picasa, but I am just searching for something "better", from my perspective.

Lightroom can completely replace Photoshop for most photographic needs. I will only use Photoshop for a "photo" if I need to do any type of fakery-type manipulation to it. That's more a form of painting, illustration or compositing rather than "editing." Stuff not normally part of a traditional photographic workflow.

Using Lightroom is also completely non-destructive as all edits are stored as metadata.

If you want to continue to use Photoshop and you would not use any editing features in Lightroom, it may be too much for you.

You should definitely keep a separate program for quick viewing, regardless of what you use as a library/asset management app. The two types of programs are distinctly different and in my opinion, diametrically opposed. It is simply not possible to have one program be very good at both things.

In that light, I use Lightroom for all my management and library browsing. For quick image viewing I use a program in Mac OS called "Xee" which is very much like very old versions of ACDSee - it doesn't have a thumbnail browser and it's insanely fast compared to other tools. It also supports pretty much every image format under the sun, including all my old Amiga IFF. However, I don't use this program, Xee, to browse images that are in my photo library folder structure. I just have way too many images and the UI in Lightroom is much better suited for finding things than browsing the file system.

Xee, and even Lightroom for that matter, allow you to quickly open an image into another program.

Based on your first post, I still think Picasa and Lightroom are your two best options, with the possibility of the newer ACDSee PRO as a third option. You can then still use a fat Explorer-based viewer if neither of those suits you in that regard. I'm not certain if ACDSee Pro still tries to do that like the older non-pro versions used to.

Lightroom can completely replace Photoshop for most photographic needs. I will only use Photoshop for a "photo" if I need to do any type of fakery-type manipulation to it. That's more a form of painting, illustration or compositing rather than "editing." Stuff not normally part of a traditional photographic workflow.

Using Lightroom is also completely non-destructive as all edits are stored as metadata.

If you want to continue to use Photoshop and you would not use any editing features in Lightroom, it may be too much for you.

You should definitely keep a separate program for quick viewing, regardless of what you use as a library/asset management app. The two types of programs are distinctly different and in my opinion, diametrically opposed. It is simply not possible to have one program be very good at both things.

In that light, I use Lightroom for all my management and library browsing. For quick image viewing I use a program in Mac OS called "Xee" which is very much like very old versions of ACDSee - it doesn't have a thumbnail browser and it's insanely fast compared to other tools. It also supports pretty much every image format under the sun, including all my old Amiga IFF. However, I don't use this program, Xee, to browse images that are in my photo library folder structure. I just have way too many images and the UI in Lightroom is much better suited for finding things than browsing the file system.

Xee, and even Lightroom for that matter, allow you to quickly open an image into another program.

Based on your first post, I still think Picasa and Lightroom are your two best options, with the possibility of the newer ACDSee Photo Manager or ACDSee Pro as third and fourth options (wow has ACDSee changed a lot in the past few years!). You can then still use a fast Explorer-based viewer if neither of those suits you in that regard. I'm not certain if the new ACDSee versions still tries to do that like the older versions used to.

ACDSee Pro however costs $169 which is only 30 less than Lightroom - that would take it off the table for me. The other version is $70 versus Picasa's free. But, if Picasa's bug is as you describe, that's something horrible to have to live with - unless of course you can avoid using its viewer and pick something else for that part of your usage...

Ok, I've been trying ACDSee Pro Demo in the last hour, and I am impressed. I suspend any judgement so far, as I'd like to play with it for a while, and do the same with lightroom, but so far ACDSee is impressive. It is in many ways similar to lightroom, so one of the two companies copied the other in terms of GUI and some of its paradigms.

But, it is very very powerful. You should give it a try, if you haven't, Bruno. As you said, it has changed a lot.

In any case, yes, I see what you're saying, but I don't agree it is impossible to have a program good at both things - quick view, library mgt.
Maybe it's not out there, which is possible, but I think it's worth searching a bit.

My collection is fairly large, now, and I've been postponing this for a while. ACDSee is promising, I have to tell you.

I'm similarly disappointed in Picasa, but for slightly different reasons. Using the Mac version, I haven't noticed that particular memory leak bug, but I have been very disappointed in the infamous disappearing database problem when your collection is on a network drive. Basically, if your network share (mine is NFS) goes away for any reason, all of your folders disappear, and the next time you start it up, it has to rescan everything. It appears to have gotten better in recent versions, but I've still had my collection disappear a few times in the most recent release, even once when I'm certain my file server was up and the share was accessible.

I'm also disappointed that there's still no support for hierarchical albums, and the editing tools are pretty bare-bones. Yeah, it's free, and yes, it's still a very good program, but with Google's oomph behind it, I really thought it would improve faster than it has, especially given how so much of Facebook's appeal is the picture sharing. I'd think Google would be aggressively pursuing an integrated photo solution, but progress on the Picasa desktop applications has been about as fast as I remember it from the pre-Google days.

ACDSee is proving nice, but I can't get it to find the lens used in my picture. It must be in the exif data because Lightroom finds it. And, tagging is still a mystery to me in ACDSee. It kind of work, tags are called "keywords" in ACDSee, but to apply them is not even nearly as quick and easy as in Lightroom and Picasa.

As a viewer, ACDSee proves great as I remember it was years ago.

It's a bit frustrating because these three programs are just one step away from doing what I want.

Google for this. That information may be part of "maker notes" which not every program that supports exif will be able to read/handle.




"tag" is a misnomer for this. "keyword" is actually the proper term, so ACDSee is using it correctly. Some people will use the word "tag" to describe an IPTC or EXIF "field."

I'm not crazy about Lightroom's support for keywords either, but at least it's somewhat usable and does support hierarchical keywords. A lot more can be done here and there are at least a couple of third-party programs for this purpose for Mac OS alone.

.... and, ACDSee does not do face recognition either.

Thanks Bruno for all the insights and info so far.

In case others think this bug exists universally for Picasa users (I read it that way initially), I haven't had this issue on any of my systems.

My ten cents:

If your whole life is JPEG pictures, then Picasa is pretty damn good. You can write arbitrary text into the captions and do full-text search on them. Picasa doesn't play nicely with network shares, but it does rescan JPEGs insanely fast. The guy who wrote Picasa was a serious performance nut, so everything it does is just stupid fast.

If you want a workflow involving raw images, sadly, you should forget Picasa and use Adobe Lightroom. Lightroom 3, in particular, finally has decent noise reduction and lens distortion correction built-in. You can also get plugins that make it easy to export to Flickr or Picasaweb or whatever else. Lightroom has an insane amount of control over metadata. You can apply arbitrary text tags to images and later search for them. You can also tag with stars (0-5), flags (thumbs up or down), colors (five or six of them), and title/caption.

Keep in mind that Lightroom requires a much faster machine to make up for its inexplicably poor performance.

Yes this is very true, it is quite sluggish on my Mac Pro. It likes to have lots of memory and fast disks and even then it doesn't seem too fast at anything really. What it lacks in performance it gains in quality though, the output is superb if you are using a RAW workflow.

Cheers

Cris

The thing that bothers me most about Picasa is that its integration with Picasa Web Folders is abysmal. I effectively just treat them as two separate entities.

It seems to be related to user permission context. If you run the main EXE as Administrator, it will not happen. But, even if you are an administrator and run Picasa by opening direclty an image file, the problem persists. Or at least, this happens to me and many others, it seems.


Indeed, it is fast. My life is almost entirely JPEG. However, I am trying to play with RAW, just for fun, in the future. If I had to spend money on some program, I'd like it to work with RAW. Now, Picasa is free, so ok. Lightroom is probably the best in dealing with RAW, I am told here and elsewhere. ACDSee does deal with RAW, but would not know how well.
In any case, at least currently, RAW is not primarily important.
My collection is entirely on a network drive, and I am planning to keep it like that in the forseable future, as it is being accessed by two laptops, my (new/fast) machine, and possibly, at some point, by an HTPC which I will be installing in my living room.


I do have a new and very fast machine, SSD based, so Lightroom opens fairly fast, fortunately. But, picasa is faster, in any case. ACDSee is just as fast as Picasa when used as a simple image viewer. When browsing through the image collection, it seems a bit faster than lightroom but definitely slower than Picasa.

ACDSee is looking really interesting. It is extremely powerful, and while not as feature rich as Lightroom, it can definitely compete with it in terms of photo collection management and organization. It beats Lightroom as a viewer, and as a viewer is more feature rich and versatile than Picasa.
I would be leaning towards ACDSee if it wasn't that I'd like some more power in reading Exif and similar data out of my pictures.
Indeed, you can associate keywords to any picture and then search for it. It saves searches so to create smart collections like Lightroom. Logic operators for searches seem to me just as good as Lightroom ones.

I'll keep playing...

I am an administrator, but it does not happen when I open images directly. I've opened a dozen files and I don't see any weirdness from Picasa's file viewer.

I second that ! It works if I upload everything from the main computer that has Picasa on it but if you upload a picture from another source it will almost never download it onto my main computer.

One other random bit of advice. Lightroom makes it easy for you to convert from "native" raw files to Adobe's DNG format. Do not do this. Keep everything in its original format. This gives you more flexibility later. For example, the authors of Bibble are adamant that they won't support converted DNG files. They do, however, somewhat interoperate with Adobe's xmp "sidecar" files which Lightroom writes out next to your raw files, to hold all the metadata you add.

... speaking of which, I am also considering technology lifecycle. Once you start tagging your collection, it is a massive amt of work that you put into it, and definitely you don't want to lose it. Both Lightroom and ACDSee and Picasa will create a fairly large DB (2-4 GB for each fo the above mentioned sw, in my case) including thumbnails and metadata.
Now, in this specific regard, I'd feel safer that Lightoroom will survive for years, and should it ever disappear, it is so widely and professionally used that converters to extract data from its db to be migrated somewhere else will likely be available when needed.

But, how about ACDSee or Picasa. How unlikely is it that Google or ACDSystems just stop development at some point in the future and you're left with an outdated software and its huge locked proprietary db?
Maybe I'm paranoyd or as usual looking for the non-existent definitve tool, but from this perspective Lightroom makes me more comfortable.

Still, as a product, ACDSee is the closest to what I personally want and like.

The database is largely irrelevant if the software is of any decent quality. That is to say, you should really only consider software using open standards or with published specifications.

Lightroom uses EXIF, IPTC and XMP - you don't lose anything in terms of keywords or metadata if you move away from Lightroom.

I would expect that Picasa and ACDSee also use the same standards, but I don't know for sure - should be easy to verify.

What you would "lose" in respect to Lightroom, is the ability to reproduce its visual edits until such time as another piece of software replicated the features/instructions stored in their metadata. However, you can always also generate TIFF (or other format) versions with the edits in place if you wanted to stop using Lightroom. Your raw files (be they actual RAW format, JPEG format or whatever) and their descriptive metadata are always preserved.

I would also strongly recommend you start shooting in raw exclusively. DOn't waste your time as I did for a while shooting JPG+RAW. You will only be left with a bunch of JPG images you'll never use. Once you start using one of these programs you won't feel you're missing the JPG images at all - you can easily export as many JPG images at any time for any purpose.

I was under the impression that Lightroom and ACDSee (may) store some data (keywords, in particular, or comments) in their DB and not in the EXIF, IPTC, XMP. Maybe I am wrong in this, at least for Lightroom?

ACDSee is more confusing, now that I think about it. While paying with it yesterday, I did see that ACDSee has some metadata which is supposedly in the local DB, while other is in the EXIF/IPTC. I need to read more. I am guessing it is possible that ACDSee takes EXIF/IPTC data and copies it into a local db for performance reasons... Mmmh.

Lightroom does store/cache a lot of stuff in its own DB. However, that is only for ease of use and performance. Everything can be written back to either the imbedded metadata or sidecar files.

If Lightroom was constantly accessing the contents of the files themselves, then performance would be even slower than it is now.

Lightroom writes out all your metadata for a given image into the xmp "sidecar" files. I regularly copy pictures to my laptop, process them in Lightroom, then copy the raw files + xmp files over to my desktop, and everything just works.

What doesn't just magically work is when you start making "virtual copies" of your pictures. Do that, and you're guaranteed a world of hell in trying to move your images from one computer to another.

Picasa, last I checked, has its own proprietary but remarkably simple text format, one file per directory, where it writes everything out. Not really a big deal to write a short Perl/Python/whatever program to crack it.

I have no idea about ACDSee.

It's worthy to note that Lightroom only writes sidecar files for files that it cannot (or will not) write directly into - which can be even for simple EXIF edits in my experience.

And it's a good idea to force it to write out all its data before moving it around, just to make sure that what exists outside the database is fresh/current.

I've found that the tricky issues come when trying to use another piece of software along side Lightroom that may have the capability to write directly into the file (back to the original EXIF). At that point you've got to do a little dance to make sure you have the correct data, including refreshing the info in Lightroom. Be careful, because if the other program can't deal with the external XMP, then you're going to be stuck and won't be able to merge the two sets of edits. In such a case it's a good idea to use the external program first. Specific example, some GeoTagging software I've tried in Mac OS.

Since you also brought up Bibble, do you have any thoughts on Lightroom vs. Bibble? Most of the comparisons I've found online have been fairly outdated, but the gist of it comes down to minor (and subjective) colour differences, and a slightly better UI in Lightroom. I saw one review that said Lightroom's de-noising is significantly better than Bibble (which has some basic Noise Ninja settings), but may not be any better than Bibble + the registered Noise Ninja plugin, which gives full control. Oh, and Bibble's fill light sucks.

The pluses for me, is that I can store my images on my harddrive however I want, and, should I ever go back to Linux at home (from OS X), I can keep using it.

I've never actually used Bibble. I have roughly one year of my shooting in "converted" DNG format (having discarded the original raw files). Since Bibble doesn't support this, that was a deal-breaker for me. Perhaps I should revisit Bibble.

As such, I can't really offer a meaningful comparison between them. What's eminently clear is that Bibble's authors are performance nutcases, so Bibble should run significantly faster than Lightroom. If you're on older hardware, that's a big consideration. On the flip side, Lightroom's UI is supposed to be better and there's real third-party plug-in support now. (For example, I regularly use the PicasaWeb exporter from Jeff Friedl.)

Ok. ACDSee also does as Lightroom. It creates its own, hdd-based DB after collecting data from the actual photo files; it writes either on DB only (rating, and others), or in sidecar files, or in the jpg files themselves depending on the cases.
There is a quite explanatory paragraph in the on-line help.

It actually is really good in letting you decide where in your file system you want the DB to be, and provides, on its website, a nice video tutorial on how to use the built-in migration feature to move the DB from one PC to another. However, because it is so nicely configurable, one could simply move the files and have the newly-installed software point at the selected db location.

ACDSee is proving, in my little test in these days, a really good software. The GUI is not as nice as Lightroom, but it is indeed very good and more configurable. It is not as feature rich in terms of editing, but very rich nonetheless. And it is faster, by far, than Lightroom.

Plus, it comes with very nice features Lightroom does not offer: a blazing fast, flexible and poweful quick viewer, and, also important, it automatically detects new dirs and files added to your collection. Lightroom does not, and when you force it to do so, it has been incredibly slow in adding pictures and metadata.

So, ACDSee has all I seem to need (except for face recognition, which I gave up on), and one show-stopper : it won't read Canon Lens Used metadata. It is being requested by dozens of users (some professionals among them, I read) on their forums, and there's no word from the producers. That's quite disappoiinting. I would be seriously considering to purchase it, but it is annoying for me not be able to sort pictures by lens used. Too annoying, I am afraid, to justify $180.
Yes, I may do that from windows explorer, but I'd rather have it within the same sw I use to organize and catalogue my collection, of course.

In any case, I'll keep testing... I may change my mind and decide to get it, at the end of the trial period. I still can't find anything else that gets as close to what I want as ACDSee, I have to say. If only lightroom came with a nice quick viewer...

... For the record, Windows Explorer does have two metatags available concerning Lens, but they don't show anything, neither for Nikon nor for Canon pictures.

I believe that the converted DNG still isn't supported, but they do support some straight-from-the-camera DNG. I don't know how they tell the difference. If you do give it a whirl (or if anyone else has used both), I'm all ears.


There is plugin support for bibble, but I have my doubts that the number of available plugins is as extensive as for Lightroom. Bibble has a "web gallery" export, but I don't know if that means "dump out images and an html file" or "upload to Picasa/Facebook/pick-yer-poison".

This is not really answering your question, as I am not experienced with either sw in terms of photo editing.
But, I've been testing Bibble as an photo collection manager in the last weeks, and I did not particularly like it. It crashed few times while accessing my photo collection, which is on a shared directory in a file server. It crashed a couple of other times while importing the whole collection (30,000 pics). It often takes time to shut down, saying that it is "busy", which gets annoying.
Most importantly (to me), I've used it so that my catalogue would only be referring to the file system, as I have my pictures organized in directories and don't want them moved. In such a mode, I would have expected that it would detect changes in the file system, and update the catalogue automatically. It does not. You get thumbnails with a "?" on them to indicate the original file is "missing".
In this respect, so far ACDSee is by far the best photo collection manager I've found, at least for me. It does all I want, and very quickly.
I liked, in Bibble, though, that you can easily create more catalogues, which is not an easy task in ACDSee. Supposedly, nexy ACDSee version will include some easier multi-catalogue support.

Finally, how hard can it be to detect Canon lens info?!
ACDSee does not yet detect Canon Lenses at all, and on their forum I read "it is being implemented"; Bibble does, but 90% of pics report wrong lens info! In my collection I had thousands of 70-300 lenses used, which I do not own, in the "24-70" focal length range?!
Since Lightroom gets them right, I know it must be possible. How hard can it be?