What is your video and photo organization tool?

[Wheat King]

Also interested in hearing why you use the tools you do.

[momoffduty]

Use PSE for organizing pics. Use Bridge to locate & view video, music, motion backgrounds, graphics. My brother the photographer uses Light Room and swears by it.

[Gerlinde]

I also use the PSE organizer. But I use it only for my pictures and slide shows I made. I like the tagging system and also that I can apply a meta data file with my info to all the pictures I import. I'm not sure if I will use the PE organizer for my videos in the same way. I did not see a need for it yet.
I also use Bridge sometimes and I use Itunes for my music.

[Bill Hunt]

I mostly use ThumbsPlus 7 (Cerious Software). They are about to release ver. 8, but I declined to beta-test this, due to time issues.

Next, I use Bridge.

Hunt

[Chuck Engels]

I use iTunes for music, with over 10,000 mp3s I need something

Next comes Bridge, never have gotten comfortable with the Organizer in Photoshop Elements.
I look at Bridge as a combination of Windows Explorer and the PSE Organizer.

[Helen]

I use the PSE organizer for all my photos. I like the tagging and all my photos can be found in no time at all. I have started tagging my video clips using a separate catalogue.
Use Itunes for music.

[Spot]

PSE:
Tried the PSE organizer but find it very annoying because it doesn't automatically update itself with your drive contents, and then has a heart attack if it can't find an image. This may have been fixed with later versions?
Bridge:
I really like Bridge in principle and the way it works, just find it slooowwww for browsing. Each time I open a different folder it has to rebuild its thumbnails or rearrange its sock drawers or something!
Picasa:
Keep coming back to Picasa! Its very fast and instantly adds new images no matter how they were added to watched folders. Some of the quick fixes (especially red-eye) are handy sometimes. Very good free tool!

JB

[Chuck Engels]

Each time I open a different folder it has to rebuild its thumbnails or rearrange its sock drawers or something!

JB

Hi JB,
You need to save/cache the thumbnails, then it won't have to redraw them anymore
I am dealing with 1000s of motion backgrounds for muvipix, not to mention my own video, and had the same problem.
Then I figured out that the thumbnail views could be saved, that made a world of difference.
I think it is - Tools/Cache/Build and Export Cache

If anyone else can confirm that it would be a huge help

You can also control how quick the thumbnails are originally drawn in Edit/Preferences/Thumbnails.

[Spot]

Chuck!
You may well have just reinvented my workflow!
I'll be checking this out tonight.
Thanks
JB

[Bob]

I'm a Bridge user. I didn't start out that way. I was a long term user of Organizer from back when it was a standalone product called Album. The last version of Organizer I used was the one that shipped with Photoshop Elements 3.

The switch to Bridge was the result of two things. First, I stopped using Photoshop Elements and moved to Photoshop. And second, I started shooting using raw files instead of jpgs. When I first starting using Photoshop, I continued using the PE 3 Organizer, but edited using Photoshop. That worked well while I was mainly using jpgs, and I wasn't too thrilled with the initial release of Bridge anyway -- it was a bit buggy and slow. But, when I began using raw files, it didn't work quite as well. Metadata from the Adobe Camera raw adjustments was stored in a separate file from the associated raw file and Organizer ignored that file. Since Organizer moved your working photo file to a temporary folder while editing, the metadata file was lost unless you manually did the copying to and from that temporary folder. Workable, but not very satisfactory. When Photoshop CS3 was released, I found that Bridge had improved considerably and had become quite usable. I had Organizer write the tags to the files and switched to Bridge. I haven't regretted it.

To be honest, I didnt' have strong ties to Organizer anyway. I didn't use Organizer "Creations", and I didn't use Organizer for printing -- the print module in Organizer was different from the one in Photoshop Elements and didn't do a particularly good job with a color managed work flow. I always got better results printing from Photoshop Elements and later from Photoshop. I found the switch relatively painless. And, now that I've been using Bridge for a while, I feel quite comfortable with it and appreciate all the extra controls and capabilities that Bridge provides. I really haven't had an issue with the thumbnails. The initial time I cached my photo and video directories, it took a while, but now everything is relatively fast. I seldom think about it.

[Bobby]

I mostly use ThumbsPlus 7 (Cerious Software). They are about to release ver. 8, but I declined to beta-test this, due to time issues.

Next, I use Bridge.

Hunt

Hunt and I always seem to have things in common. I have been a Thumbs Plus user for a very long time, and I also have not been as active as a beta tester for V8 due to time and other constraints. It is worth a look.

[Bill Hunt]

Bob,

I can't wait to see how Thumbs8 works. I guess that we had our opportunity, but I'm not really into beta-testing much of anything nowadays. In my youth, it was different, as I did not mind setting up a computer just to test a program, and rebuild it, if things went horribly wrong. Not any more.

I'm mostly hoping that it will embrace even more display CODEC's, as I always seem to have some Asset that it chokes on (up to version 7.x). From what I have read, it seems that Cerious is trying to incorporate more image editing power. I do not need that, as I have Photoshop and Painter.

I'm sure that I'll upgrade to Thumbs8 Pro, as soon as it's released and will just put it through its paces. All I really care about is an organizer that handles about every image format and CODEC, that I can throw at it.

Hunt

[Bob D]

I use PSE6 for cataloging. I almost abandoned it when trying to upgrade from 3 to 6 when it wouldn't catalog all my video backups I did on DVD's. It turned out to be a blessing as I was able to move all the DVD's with the 15+ years of video clips on to external drives. I was able to catalog the video clips in a separate catalog. Now searching and retrieving clips is much easier. So now I have two catalogs within PSE6 - one for photos, and one for videos.

Bob D

[Bobby]

Hunt, I have actually been testing all the V8 beta releases, just not as actively as I usually do. There are many changes and there will probably some a bit of a learning curve when you get it.

I cherish the ThumbsPlus sweatshirt I got for being a beta tester for a previous version.