A few days ago, I launched a website: Photo Organizing Stuff - Resources and Courses for Professional Photo Organizers.
Photo organizing is a young and rapidly growing field, yet most professional photo organizers use software that does not allow them to view, sort and filter by essential photo and video metadata fields. I rely heavily on Opus when organizing digital photo and video collections.
Today I published part 1 of a series about how I use Opus. There is an article and a corresponding video.
Xyzzy,
Because there is not a bunch of DAM software with much greater capabilities for what I need to do to organize large complex digital photo and video collections for clients.
I have done extensive testing over the past 5 or more years.
I do also rely heavily on Duplicate Cleaner Pro, by Digital Volcano
What application(s) do you have in mind? If I have tested whatever application(s) you are thinking of, I would gladly give you a reason or 2 why they are not suitable.
Meg Macintyre
From these I personally have experience with:
DAMs iMatch, PhotoSupreme, ACDSee, Zoner - flying with hundreds of thousands of images
These also have some organizers integrated: Photoshop Elements, PaintShop Pro
Free and totally competent for home use: Picasa, Xnview
Image duplicate detectors are a plenty even free ones (I wonder how people end up with a bunch of rotated, cropped, recolored etc images - to begin with).
There is also Excire mentioned on your side - 200 USD AI image tagger - this feature you get as extra with modern DAMs for much less price.
Xyzzy,
I realize you are trying to be helpful.
I've looked at the applications you listed and tested some of them and am a beta tester for Excire and for 4 other photo-related applications you did not list.
Excire is part of my workflow, but adding tags in bulk is not appropriate for a person's private photo collection. A smaller selections of tags/keywords the client would really use to search is better.
Some applications I won't bother to test for possible use for main file management tasks. For example, I won't bother to an application that does not allow me view, sort and filter by certain metadata field, especially EXIF date fields -- unless there is another unique feature it offers.
I will soon be starting to post parts of demonstration video series (screen recordings) showing me organizing a large and complex collection. Opus will figure prominently. If you decide to watch any of these demo videos (publicly available on my YouTube Channel), I think you'd getter a better idea of what I'm doing, and you would find yourself thinking, "That can't be done with iMatch, or ACDSee, etc."
As for de-duping, Only Duplicate Cleaner pro lets me set very specific criteria and then allows me to see sort an filter the results. It's vital to preserve metadata like Keywords and info people have added (like meaningful folder names) as one photo can have added info, and a duplicate does not. I have been a consulting for them for 3 years.
One of the most useful things about Opus is that I can select files, move them, and recreate the folder structure. That is critical. When I separate out photos without good/intact date metadata, I move them to an 'Undated folder' and am able to recreate the folder structure. That's important, because an Undated photo could be in a folder named 'Christmas 2014', and I need to keep that info.