With a bunch more photos in hand, and hundreds still stuck on my laptop that all need to be sorted, it was time to do something about it. I currently have thousands of photos sorted into folders according to the time and place they were taken. This works pretty good too, but when somebody comes and asks me to see all the photos of "so and so" it becomes an endless work of digging through every folder in search of any photos which may contain "so and so". This is the same problem that I have when people want photos for "such and such" too.
Now I have been aware of this problem for a while, and have been trialing a number of different software types in search of the perfect solution. Of course there is no such thing as the perfect solution, but it is nice to come close at least. Finally, I suspect that I have found what I need.
IMatch 3 is a photo cataloguing program that, although a little technical to start with, provides all the functionality I need at a price that is affordable. I had previously looked at using the
iView program (now part of the
Phase One software group) which is very good too, but it had a much higher investment cost that I could not justify.
Impulse Adventure provided a great
comparison page between all of the different programs that could do this sort of job for me, and through this and other reviews that I read, it was obvious that
IMatch was a great program.
So now I am busy in all of my spare time starting to sort out each and every single photo that I have. At last check there were something like 21,000 photos that I need to catalogue, but this keeps growing every time I take more shots. Some of
these photos are currently on the web, but it has been a while since I added more there because of the state of disrepair my photos had fallen into.
Now I have new hope that one day they will all be sorted, and if I should ever want to find all of my photos that contain "closeups of Henry and Julie together in Argentina during 2004" then it is a simple click of a button to find them. There is a lot of work to get there, but it is highly feasible. After all, this is a small image collection compared to many photographers out there.
So if you are wondering what I may be doing couped up indoors for days on end, you can be sure that I will be sorting photos. Sorting, sorting, sorting, sorting, sorting...
...til it is done.