There are a number of inexpensive programs all of which do the job with ease. Adobe Photoshop Album, Jasc Paint Shop Photo Album, ACDSee5.0 and on the expensive end, Extensis Portfolio. There are certainly others as well, but these are the most readily available. All cover the basics thoroughly, and mostly vary in the added "bells and whistles".
All can be used for single users. Extensis Portfolio is aimed at asset management in a publishing environment, and probably overkill for most single users, since it costs around four times the price of the others.
I chose ACDSee primarily because I already was a user of their FotoAngelo slide-show software which is included in their full suite of apps. It combines great simplicty with power in a completely intuitive interface. One does not have to relearn the software on the occasions when one does a slide-show. ACDSee itself is much the same way.
I have over 36,000 JPEGs alone on my main image processing computer, and probably as many or more on my second machine. I can find any one of them instantly, even across the network. It has taken minimal work on my part, just a matter of thinking through ways to make it easier.
Many of the images are originals from my digital camera. When I transfer the pictures, I copy the whole folder they are in and store it in folders by year. I rename it with the month number "01." for January, and by the date it was transferred "January 02, 2004" and a couple of keywords "New Years - snow". Whether or not I am using ACDSee, this lets me find a shoot quickly.
I have ACDSee set to open in the "Nikon Originals" folder as the default. However, other folders that I access frequently "E-Mail" and "Image Processing" are set as Favorites for quick and direct access.
I have set up categories and in some cases sub-categories Travel -> Desert -> 2002, that let me see the contents of multifolder shoots. Sorting images into categories is a simple matter of drag and drop and only takes seconds, even if the images fit into several categories. Thus if I want to see all my flower shots together, I can click on "Flowers" category. If I just want to see orchid shots I click on the sub-category "Orchids".
I can also find my images by date. If I want to review my total output for 2003, I can click on the year and all my shots will flow into the tumbnail window. If I want to see what I shot in July 2003, clicking on the month will bring only those to the screen. I can shift-click on the calendar for all those within a given period say July 10th through 20th or click on a single date. Dates when images were created show up in bold-face type.
It has extensive database functions if you really love clerical work. You can attach a wealth of information to each image, enabling extremely complex searches if you would rather spend you time typing than shooting pictures. However, it will do some pretty complex searching in any case. As a test, I just had it find every shot I took in 2002 using an ISO800 setting! It found 1040 files.
It also makes renaming, moving, copying and deleting files simple. One can drag and drop tumbnails into image processing programs, word documents, e-mail and so on.
As well as image files it will handle all media files - both sound and video - including MIDI files.
As for bells and whistles, the list would be far too long, but suffice to say it has simple built-in image processing with links to any other image processing programs, a minimal slide show program with links to FotoAngelo for elaborate shows, HTML web-page generation, prints excellent contact sheets that are easily customized, orders prints on-line, does screen captures and a host of other things - probably some I have yet to discover.
I expect that the others do the same fundamental things well as well and any will serve your purposes.
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http://www.larry-bolch.com/