Look for a photo/video organizing software much like Photo Gallery 2012 for personal media archive

liberty610

Distinguished
Oct 31, 2012
24
1
18,570
Hello all.

I am currently looking for a photo/video organizing program to potentially replace my Microsoft Photo Gallery program. I have been using it for several years now to sort my photos and videos, but was wondering if there is another better/updated option.

I have a very LARGE personal media archive (a few TB worth) I have been sorting and building for years that has pictures AND video from personal events and family oriented ordeals dating all the back to the early 1990s. I have a solid system in place where I have all the content sorted in folders, and have been using Microsoft Gallery 2012 to view everything so I am not digging through countless folders to get to the content. I basically tell the program what folders to monitor, and tell it to sort everything by file name (some of the older pictures are mising meta tags for date taken info).

The program has a people tagging feature I like (much like Facebook), to where I have gone through all my pictures and tagged people so when I want to search for that person, every photo they are in pops up in the search. It also has a Geotag feature where I can tag where the photo was taken, but for some reason, the program does not write that information to the photo itself, it only saves that info in the software.c Not sure if this is a program bug, or what....

I have every single photo/video I have in the archive sorted down to the date and time it was taken and labeled the way a computer would sort it properly by name (using a numbers format). For example, if a photo was taken on December 25th, 2010 at 1:34:32pm, this is what the folder tree looks for that photo:

Drive Letter:\Archive\pix\2010\12\1225_133432.jpg

Windows Photo Gallery 2012 works well for me now, and I will probably keep using it as I have the offline installer for it (they are no longer updating it), but I am looking for something more updated and less buggy. I like this program a lot because I can view everything all together, or quickly navigate to a certain year, or even a certain month. The biggest thing I use it for is the tagging feature, and to show all the pictures and videos in one place to avoid going through all the folders. The only time I want to have to go through any of the folders is to add new files to them.

I tried Google's Picasa at one point, but I did not like it as much, and it seemed to add extra content to my archive folders, which I am very picky about. (I think I have digital OCD - I organize a lot of my stuff for easy access).

Does anyone have any suggestions for me? Thanks in advance.

EDIT - I am NOT interested in cloud storage options.... offline desktop downloads only. Thanks!
 

liberty610

Distinguished
Oct 31, 2012
24
1
18,570
Thank you guys for the suggestions! I looked around online before posting this thread, and ACDsee was one that opped up a lot. I'm giving the trail a go at. Seems like a solid program. I am mostly just using the geotagging feature right now, but everything else in it looks solid! Thanks for the replies. I think I may end up picking a full version up after my trial.