Opinion: A few apps to help organise your photo library

A screenshot of Adobe Lightroom. Lightroom is a cloud-based system, meaning all your photos are stored in the cloud storage that you are paying for each month. — Jim Rossman/TNS

This week a reader writes: I used to use Picasa (to organise photos), but it is no longer available. Over the years I have had my PC upgraded with new hard drives. I have about 30 years of pictures, which number about 30,000. Do you know of software that will go through the folders, files and sub files and collect all the pictures and put them in one folder in chronological order?

I’m going to recommend two apps for you to compare and see what works best for you.

Before you start, I recommend testing each app with a subset of your pictures, not all 30,000 at once.

Set up a test folder with several folders nested inside with some pictures in each.

This will show you how the apps handle the importing of images.

The first app is Google Photos, which is what Google recommends to former Picasa users (Picasa was a Google app).

Google Photos uploads your images to the cloud so you can easily access them from almost any device.

Google Photos is free, but you only get 15 gigabytes of storage. If you have more photos, you can pay for more storage. You can upgrade to 100GB of storage for US$2 (RM9) per month or 2 terabytes for US$10 (RM46) per month. It gets cheaper if you pay by the year.

You use the Google Drive app to upload from your computer. It will search out images in subfolders and everything uploads seamlessly.

Adobe Lightroom is another app you should try, but be warned: It requires a subscription, which includes access to several Adobe apps including Lightroom, Lightroom Classic and Photoshop, plus some cloud storage.

Lightroom is a cloud-based system, meaning all your photos are stored in the cloud storage that you are paying for each month.

Lightroom Classic is a desktop-based app, meaning all the photos remain on your computer. Sadly, Lightroom Classic is not available without the subscription and the access to the other apps.

Lightroom and Lightroom Classic both allow the user to edit and manipulate photos, much like Photoshop.

Adobe does make one more app called Bridge that is only a file organiser. Bridge is free, but it offers no editing capabilities.

Bridge excels at organising photos and adding/editing metadata, which is the information about each photo, such as filename, keywords, caption, location and camera settings.

There are other photo organising apps, including the free Apple Photos, if you use a Macintosh.

If these don’t suit your needs, you’ll have to dive into an Internet search and check out a few others. – Tribune News Service