- Picasa is a simple and easy-to-use photo organization tool available from Google for free. Users of Picasa have an arsenal of tools available to edit and modify pictures, including the ability to add name tags to identify people in pictures (similar to Facebook), fix red-eye, straighten photos, adjust brightness and contrast, as well as fine tune lighting and shadows. Additionally, Picasa offers a wide selection of special effects that can be applied to photos such as the film grain effect, graduated tint and focal black-and-white.
Perhaps the most unique features of Picasa is the social factor. Picasa makes it extremely easy to share photos in a variety of ways, including offering users 1GB of online storage with Picasa Web Albums, which can be publicly or privately shared with the entire world or just friends and family. Photos can also be instantly shared on a blog, emailed to others or ordered as prints. The simple two-pane interface make every feature easy-to-find and even easier to use. - ACDSee's Photo Manager software has long been a popular choice for photo organization. With this software, users can keep more than 100 different file types organized, and the easy backup tool makes sure that no photos will be lost in the event of a computer crash. Photography can be synced with an external hard drive, USB key drive or a network-attached drive.
Although ACDSee does not offer its own online service for storage, it does offer the ability to upload photos to other well-known services, such as Flickr and SmugMug. Users can also add photo widgets to a blog to share their captured moments.
To make photos easier to locate, ACDSee offers the option to assign categories and keywords to pictures, which can then be searched for directly within the software. Several photo adjustment tools similar to those in Picasa are also available, to give any picture that perfect look. Don't expect Picasa's free price, however, as ACDSee Photo Manager runs for around $50 with a free 30-day trial demo available (as of 2009) to test it out. - Irfanview is yet another freeware option for those who want to organize without spending a dime. Having been around since 1996, Irfanview has developed a following for it lightweight file size and its wide variety of compatible file formats, including non-image formats such as Flash, MP3, MPEG video and even text files.
Although Irfanview does not offer as many image editing/effects features as some of the other photo organizing solutions, it is unique in offering a Paint option (to allow for drawing circles or lines on photos), as well as a plug-in feature to extend its abilities. This software also offers support for Adobe Photoshop filters.
Features that you will not find in Irfanview are the ability to share photos online (at least from within the software) and support for CMYK color profiles (CMYK profiles can only be viewed correctly through the use a downloaded plugin).
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