Creating Multiple PC Photo Albums

[Brian Tilley]

Hi,

This kind of goes along with a recent thread: Photo Organization http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=47330

I have been using a good method to store pictures on the pc, but would like a better way to view collections of them.

I'm looking for a good program to generate "photo albums" to view on my pc. I have tried a few, but all of them require that copies of each picture be created for each album. Seems like a waste of hard drive space.

Is there a program that will, as it creates an album, just remember the existing location of an image on the pc rather than creating a copy?

Say I wanted to do an album of vacation shots, another of nature shots, and one more of just birds. A picture of an eagle I took while on vacation in Alaska might be something I would want to include in all three albums.

It would be nice if all three albums would point to the one copy of the eagle picture already stored in: Photos\Vacations\Alaska May_04 directory, rather than creating three more copies, one for each album.

Any suggestions?

[Scottes]

Have you taken a look at something like ACDSee or ThumbsPlus? They make thumbnails, not copies, and store the info in a database - along with EXIF info, etc. Quick, easy, and very nice.

[samdring]

Yup, as Ninja Scottes recommends, I use ACDSee 6.0 for exactly the situations outlined in your last couple of paragraphs

[commando]

Are you wanting a solution for organising images on your hard drive, or for creating galleries on the web? I've looked into image managers before, there's quite a few around, but after playing with the trials I didn't really like any of the ones I found :(

I use JAlbum (http://jalbum.net) to generate web galleries. I have the same problem: I have a gallery that's under my real name, and one that's under my screen name, and I don't want the two to cross over. Right now my solution is to have two copies on the drive, but that's not a good solution. One solution under window could be to use shortcuts perhaps? That's a very manual and annoying task though.