Is your hard drive starting to saturate with all the photos you’ve been piling up for months or even years? With the smartphones that we draw at every sunset, your Pictures folder can quickly become a big mess. Something to annoy you when you want to find the shots you prefer.
To help you find your way through the mountain of photos you have imported, we have prepared a small selection of free software for you. These will be very useful for sorting and classifying your photos efficiently. Generally very easy to handle, these image managers will allow you to better organize yourself to find all your photos quickly.
Google Photos
Available in mobile application and online service, Google Photos is the management and backup service for your photos developed by Google. The main interest of Google Photos is to allow you to access all your photos from any device and save them to your online account to prevent their permanent loss in the event of a hardware problem. But Google Photos also includes an efficient and relevant tool for organizing your photos. Indeed, not only does it classify and sort the photos by date, but it also allows you to arrange them according to the people or animals that appear in them.
With its visual recognition system, it detects the main features of a portrait or an animal or groups them together if they are similar. The same goes for landscape themes, birthdays, picnics, parks and many events. Of course, with Google Photos, it is also possible to create albums according to your own criteria and share them with your friends. And to top it off, the service also includes photo editing features.
Amazon Pics
Amazon Photos is a cloud photo storage solution from Amazon. It offers an easy and secure way to store, share and print digital photos, whether with family and friends, or for business purposes. With the growing number of devices used to take photos today, Amazon Photos helps avoid the hassle of moving images from one device to another. Once you’ve uploaded your photos to Amazon Photos, you can access them from any computer or mobile device, anywhere in the world.
You also get unlimited free storage for your photos, videos, and documents, plus access to 5GB of space for non-photo content, like music files. Don’t worry about losing quality either; Amazon Photos offers compression algorithms that apply lossless compression so you don’t lose your image quality while saving valuable space. Thanks to Amazon Photo’s intuitive user experience, it’s never been easier to organize and share perfect photos, right from your home.
XnView MP
Although it offers a slightly more austere interface than that of its competitors, XnView MP is a more complete and more compatible version of the XnView released 20 years ago. In detail, it has the advantage of managing a very large number of file formats (more than 500) and includes several functions allowing you to edit your photos before sharing them. Not insignificant asset, it offers efficient batch conversions.
FastStone Image Viewer
Although FastStone Image Viewer is not as comprehensive as other software in this folder, it does have a few options that are worth looking into. It is in fact capable of modifying, converting and renaming photos in batches, which avoids an additional chore when sorting. Note also that it is light and responsive while offering a fairly practical full-screen display.
DigiKam
digiKam is a really complete and advanced open source image manager. Sober and pleasant to use, it is one of the only ones to offer face recognition functionality. In addition to the ability to easily share your shots on social networks, it allows you to create an image gallery in HTML. But also to geotag the photos and edit them. Only downside, its advanced features overload the menus so that it takes some time to adapt to use them at best.
PhotoDirector
PhotoDirector is a freeware for Windows, Mac, Android and iOS which is quite famous for the photo editing features it has. It also incorporates a nice to use and smooth photo collection manager.
From the Library menu, the user is able to import all the photos from their hard drive or from an external device in two clicks. It is possible to add keyword tags but also face tags, thanks to the facial recognition system. What’s more, you can of course create albums, add markers for your favorite photos and display your images in different display modes (thumbnail, list, mosaic, etc.).
irfanview
Irfanview’s interface is less modern than its competitors but it has the advantage of being simple and above all, of launching and generating a slideshow in two clicks. In terms of photo organization, Irfanview takes care of the essentials with a sorting system by date, folder, album, etc.
Several display modes are available and an internal search engine allows you to easily find your photos. There is no identification of the portraits by visual recognition. The software includes a batch file format conversion system, editing and retouching tools, a watermarking module and some additional options. Enough to make Irfanview relevant for managing your photos.
Stribe
This free app is available exclusively on iOS at the moment. It has the particularity of making sorting quick and fun thanks to its swipe functionality, “a bit like the Tinder of sorting”, details its founder. Concretely, you just have to swipe left to delete a photo and swipe right to put it in the album of your choice. It is possible to create sub-albums in order to further optimize storage (a “Family” album could for example include a “Birthdays” sub-album, a “Holidays” sub-album, etc.).
Magix Photo Manager
Magix Photo Manager is the perfect tool for organizing and editing your images. For starters, it can quickly and easily sort your photos by date, tag, location, and other criteria so you don’t waste time looking for what you need. It is also equipped with duplicate detection and automatic deletion functions. Plus, it has a host of tools to truly enhance your images – from sharpness corrections to full artistic effects, bringing out the best in your photos.
Many photo editing processing software also include a photo manager that allows you to group your albums into folders and sort your photos according to date, photo quality and many other criteria chosen by the user. Among these are Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, dark table, RawTherapee or ACDSee Photo Editor.
