Years ago I started trying out a bunch of image programs, free and pro/DOS and post DOS GUI (IrfanView was an early GUI fav), and after a few
years of trying to find one I was satisfied with, I just gave up and settled with FastStone Image viewer. It was free and fairly simplistic, but just sophisticated enough to do most of what I wanted at the time.

Anyway, it's been a long time and I never could find a really good free one or a "reasonably" priced one for purchase to suit both the functions
I needed and presented in a style I really liked.

One of the programs I tried was XnView. I was not very attracted to it. .......Fast forward to now!

I contacted FastStone for the first time recently and was put off by what appears to be their essentially non-existent support. It got me to looking
once again, after all these years, at other progs. To my amazement, after taking another look at XnView, they have come leaps and bounds with
their fairly new enhanced/extended version "XnView MP" (the enh. version is also free, for personal use).

Of all that I've seen, it comes closest to an MM like feel and functionality. And it's free!!!
But it's not for someone looking for serious pro features like face recognition, depth analysis or extensive editing/paint, etc.
It's focus is mostly on organizing with XMP, IPTC tagging, user comment, detailed criteria search for Filename and image tags, classifications
(colored stars and dots), categories, tabbed browser, movable tabbed panes, extensive toolbar customization and many other features and tweaks.

Give it a whirl if you haven't already!
....as I don't believe MM will be looking into this anytime soon.

rovingcowboy wrote:i like the old freeware PAW Photo organizer viewer program.

hey what's / where's Paw photo organizer?... i cannot find it at google

ta

Recently, I've started to consider that it would be great to have a MediaMonkey style management for my pictures. I wanted to start a thread, but figured I should search before posting and lo and behold there's already a thread. Bit disappointed though that there is no one replying about a picture manager with the features that we all seem to be looking for. I guess I'll have to have a look at Picasa again. Haven't used it in years.

Eins

mccstumble wrote:@ Gershwin04

Couldn't agree more. There are tonnes of programs for photo management and they all have thier own pro's and cons but somehow I think if the Mediamokey Team put their mind to it and had the same success as we currently enjoy with audion and video files it would be a killer programme. Can't wait until MM is looking after my photos and also streaming them to DLNA device and syncing to my smartphone.

Ideally if it owrks it will be like when they took all the hard work out of managing audio files - I still shudder at all teh grief of having to tag them and associate album art etc etc before they were eventually dropped into the audio library. Then - MM came along and simplified everything.

Bring on MM photo management..........

Couldn't agree morer!! I was excited even thinking about MM method of organization applied across all "media". It is mediamonkey right?

Well in due time, I have faith it is possible. I even checked to see if I could just import or add to MM, but the Os integration option does not permit this. I even just made a thread wondering if this is possible.

Currently, I wonder if a script just allowing MM to "see" these file types (books, photos, etc) is possible. We don't need to see them in MM, just be able to see the file & tag info so we can organize how we see fit.


Great INFO guys keep wishing for this feature keep this thread ALIVE

I have researched looking for MM style organizer for pics, and tried about 5 of the top ranked programs over the last 5 months, and i boiled it down to these two.
Picasa
Adobe Elements

In short I want a strong tagging feature and face recognition. I felt Elements is the better of the two in terms of MM style, you just have to enable the library view if you have your folders organized well. (I almost Adobe until i finally found this feature). So as it stands i am ultimately using Adobe BUT -
Adobe also has a great "Calendar" interface where it looks like a calandar with thumbnails for events, nice for going through with friends and family.

Picasa is far superior in its face recognition interface, the ability to adjust its precision and mass "mark" them is waaay faster than adobes and smoother. So what i did was use picasa for this, but apparently Picasa will not write the face recognition tag to the file(notice why i used "mark" instead of tag). So what you must do after you finish is create a custom tag with their name "John" and then within picasa select them and retag the photo so it can carry over to adobe. I assume in the future this will not be the case.
Also I am an Photoshop user, so its a bit easier for me to be in Elements environment than a standard user I think, so for the rest of my family I install Picasa for the ease of use.

and a major Plus one for added support in MM, a Picture library would be awesome.

I would love to see Picasa have a similar 'Automatic File Organizer' that MediaMonkey has (and probably iTunes but I don't know cause I don't use it). But MediaMonkey will create folder levels of your choosing AND also rewrite file names in forest City HS Class of 1975 any style you want with variables. For example the file name structure could be: <Artist> - <Album> - <Track #> and MM will do all of this in the background on your hard drive.

I use Picasa as well (swithcing to Lightroom when i need to edit my photos) but i would love to see image management in MM

@ Gershwin04

Couldn't agree more. There are tonnes of programs for photo management and they all have thier own pro's and cons but somehow I think if the Mediamokey Team put their mind to it and had the same success as we currently enjoy with audion and video files it would be a killer programme. Can't wait until MM is looking after my photos and also streaming them to DLNA device and syncing to my smartphone.

Ideally if it owrks it will be like when they took all the hard work out of managing audio files - I still shudder at all teh grief of having to tag them and associate album art etc etc before they were eventually dropped into the audio library. Then - MM came along and simplified everything.

Bring on MM photo management..........

I am also a huge fan of the MediaMonkey philosophy concerning organizing music files (in my own favourite structure).
In that matter I am also looking for a MediaMonkey like way to organize my pictures and maybe in the future also movies and ebooks....
In the past few weeks I tried several other photo organizers, both free and commercial.
Picasa soon was found nog fulfilling my needs, I was unable to group my pictures (albums) like the playlists in MM.
Also I want my collecion to be read-only so I can sync and keep a consisten backup.
Adobe Phohoshop elements is a real overkill and many others just don't have it or have a very bad performance with 12.000+ pictures on an NAS.
The only one close to my needs is FotoAlbum from FotoFime (http://www.fototime.com/pages/faprointro) but whe MediaMonkey PhotoEdition comes to market....

Regards,
Gershwin

just didn't know nohitter151 so i got really untusting of google when i seen all them photos that looked like they should not have been found..

i don't think i'll read that long lic agreement for now there eyal its too boring and toooooooooo looooooonnnnnngggg.

Made by Google doesn't meen it's working on internet. Picasa is a standalone application and personally I never used any photo sharing/publication. I use it because it simple, intuitive and powerful.

I don't think such a big corp like Goggle can permit itself to steal people's photos without their consent. (Unless it is written in very very small in the license agreement which I challenge anybody to read!)

rovingcowboy wrote:i got one question and it is the main reason i won't use the google photo library program.

that question is.

How does google get all those personal photos when you search on google for a certain photo?

some of those images that show in results look like they came from a personal album on someones computer.

Because people uploaded them to the internet to share with family members, relatives, etc. It's one of the features of Picasa actually, that you can easily share your photos with others. Of course they don't get uploaded unless you want to share them!

PS - I don't use Picasa, just telling the facts.

i got one question and it is the main reason i won't use the google photo library program.

that question is.

How does google get all those personal photos when you search on google for a certain photo?

some of those images that show in results look like they came from a personal album on someones computer.

Adobe Photoshop Elements is pretty much standard. You can try new version of it using free trial period. You can still get older versions relatively cheap.

Thank you for the great answers... I guess I should clear up some of the confusion in terms of what I mean by MediaMonkey-like.

The biggest thing with media monkey that I've liked is the control it gives me over the music files themselves. MediaMonkey is not the only program that I (let alone other people) use to access my music, so stuff like organizing the music exactly how I want it, synchronizing tags, etc. is a must.

Beyond that I have actually gone back and forth with myself on the issue of interface.

Like twinbee suggested I would mostly be using this to as a way of processing my pictures, not viewing them.

On the other hand, I feel like whenever I'm looking for a picture I switch from xplorer2 (a file explorer that is a lot like MediaMonkey in twinbee's sense) to windows explorer for thumbnails (x2 can handle thumbnails, but it doesn't cache them).

But then, if my pictures were organized I wouldn't need to go digging around and thumbnails wouldn't be necessary (and I hate those annoying thumbs.db files).

Regardless of this dilemma, my reason for asking here at MediaMonkey forums was actually to find both types so I could try out a few different programs.

Thanks again!
Will

P.S. Free is a big plus, but not necessary