11 Best Photo Management and Sorting Software (2024)

What is the best software for managing, sorting, and organizing photos?

Here are the best choices when it comes to photo management, sorting, and filing software.

1. Adobe Lightroom.

Best package ($9.99 per month).

Adobe Lightroom is a cloud-based photo management, sorting, and organizing software that lets you edit, organize, store, and share your photos on any device.

It is equipped with AI technology to automatically manage numerous photos at once and to save all the edits made on your smartphone. Additionally, it offers a machine learning function that recognizes people and themes and creates albums by itself.

Initially, you get a terabyte of cloud storage, which is enough for most graphic designers and medium-sized businesses. However, you can buy more storage space if needed.

It also uses non-destructive edits to eliminate the need to keep multiple copies of a photo. That means you can save edit adjustments while maintaining the original images and edits within the same photo.

Features

• Image tags - Take advantage of organization tools, including ratings and flags, image tags, and instantly create albums with a single click.
• Adobe Sensei - Its machine learning recognizes the faces, places, objects, themes, and colors in your images. This feature helps you find the photos you're looking for, regardless of whether you've added the relevant keywords or not.
• Photoshop integration on the iPad - Send images directly from the Lightroom library to Adobe Photoshop on your iPad and vice versa.

Pricing

You can get Adobe Lightroom as part of Adobe Creative Cloud for $9.99 per month.

Try Adobe Lightroom

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2. Adobe Bridge.

The best for cloud storage ($20.99 per month).

Adobe Bridge is an application for managing, sorting, and organizing digital assets that allows you to quickly preview, edit, organize, and publish multiple photographs. It also allows you to edit metadata and add tags, keywords, or rankings to organize your images.

Metadata search and filtering options also help you find and organize your assets in order. The photo management, sorting, and organizing application also works with several libraries, allowing you to publish your photos directly to the Adobe Stock site.

Additionally, you can visualize your images with rich previews and bold thumbnails. You can also edit your photos by opening them directly in Adobe Creative Cloud applications.

Recently, they added three key features to Adobe Bridge:

• Export images in bulk to formats like DNG, TIFF, and PNG.
• Resize images according to the short edge.
• Enables and disables thumbnail transparency.

Features

• Adobe Portfolio - Create a professional portfolio of your images, InDesign, or artwork using PDF contact sheets.
• Adobe Camera Raw - Open your raw images directly from the Bridge for editing.
• Photo Downloader - Import all your digital images using Photo Downloader to convert them to DNG files during import or rename them.

Pricing

Adobe Bridge isn't a standalone tool; it comes with the full Creative Cloud package that costs $20.99 per month.

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3. Magix Photo Story.

Best for beginners looking for a free photo management, sorting, and filing software (Free).

Magix Photo Story is a free photo organizer app that helps you edit, sort, and organize your photos and videos. Its optimized user interface allows you to make quick edits, create slideshows that are easy to share, and import photos directly from the camera.

You can also take advantage of its adjustable display modes and custom albums to find videos and photos from your library. Additionally, you can rate and categorize images for better management.

To properly highlight your photos, it offers a dark background. Finally, share your photos and videos directly from the Magix dashboard on multiple social media channels like YouTube.

In short, Magix allows you to manage, present and share your photos and videos from a single dashboard.

Features

• Cloud import - Import images directly from multiple cloud storage services. This can help you merge your local photo libraries with images that are already stored in the cloud.
• Wireless import - You can use WiFi to download your videos and photos directly from your smartphone.
• Face recognition - The Magix photo manager can detect faces to help you easily find photos of a particular person. You can register up to 10 faces with its free version.

Pricing

Magix Photo Manager is a freemium tool that allows you to manage and organize your photo collection. However, it offers paid plans for more advanced photo management, sorting and filing, and editing functions.

Here are all the pricing plans offered by Magix:

• MAGIX Photo Manager: Free
• MAGIX Photo Manager Deluxe: $49.99
• MAGIX Photostory Deluxe: $69.99

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4. ACDSee.

The best for extended RAW support ($59.99, one-time payment).

ACDSee is a tool for managing, sorting, and organizing digital assets that helps you organize your photos using facial recognition and data location functions. It also helps you find, sort, and share your media collection. Features like customizable categories, unuploaded access to your photos, and keywords help facilitate your workflow.

Additionally, ACDSee also offers performance-based adjustment layers and parametric photo editing functions. Take advantage of RAW editing and digital asset management, sorting, and organizing tools to edit your images the way you want. The GPU-enhanced software also claims to process your edited images more quickly.

Features

• Location Data - Its Map panel shows geotags to mark where you took the images. It isolates groups of images based on the region where they were taken using integrated longitudinal and latitudinal information. Additionally, it also allows you to drag and drop images to geotag them.
• Face recognition - It identifies faces so you can name people and search for images easily.
• RAW Support - It offers RAW support for over 550 digital camera models.

Pricing

ACDSee pricing starts at $59.99 as a one-time payment, per user. There is no free edition, but you can try the full version for a month at no charge.

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5. Google Photos.

Google Photos is a free photo management, sorting, and organizing software that allows you to save and access your videos and photos from any device.

You can either drag and drop your photos directly from your system to Google Photos or click the “upload” button.

Once uploaded to online storage, Google Photos automatically organizes all of your photos and makes them searchable. Simply enter relevant keywords into the search bar to find the photo you're looking for. It also allows you to search for images based on a variety of factors like events, people, and locations.

You can also easily share your photos or albums with friends and family. Simply select the media you want to share or create a link to post it on any social media channel.

Features

• Photo Prints - You can have your photos and libraries printed in an album, photo books, and canvas prints. The site also offers same-day pickup at your local CVS or Walmart. Prices for photo prints start at $0.25.
• Suggested sharing - The Google Photos “Suggested Sharing” feature shows photo groups at the top of the page and reflects events as well as face bubbles.
• Album page - Its AI engine automatically displays the pages with the photo as well as the albums you create.

Pricing

Google Photos is completely free and offers unlimited storage. However, you can only record images with a resolution of 16MP, while the videos are compressed to 1080p.

If you want to back up original files, you can opt for the paid subscription plan that starts at $1.99 per month for 100GB. The good news is that this plan is also free up to 15GB.

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6. digiKam.

digiKam is a free and open-source photo management, sorting, and filing software that can manage libraries containing over 100,000 images.

It allows you to import, manage, edit, and share RAW files or photos. You can also import photos, videos, and RAW files directly from external storage devices or digital cameras

Features

• Searchability - You can search the photo library using factors such as labels, tags, ranking, location, data, and specific IPTC, EXIF, or XMP metadata.
• libRAW - It is capable of decoding RAW files. Additionally, the library is actively maintained and regularly updated to ensure that it supports the latest camera models.
• Lens correction - It uses software based on Lensfun to allow automatic lens correction of images.

Pricing

digiKam is an open-source tool, so completely free to use.

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7. FastStone.

Faststone is a software for viewing and managing, sorting, and organizing images that helps you organize, edit, rename, and add text and watermarks to your images.

The platform supports all major image formats including JPEG, PNG, BMP, JPEG 2000, animated GIF, ICO, TIFF, PCX, WMF, TGA, etc. It also supports digital camera RAW formats like CR2, CR3, NEF, CRW, PEF, DNG, RW2, X3F, etc.

Features

• Multithreading support - All sub-tools allow you to process multiple images simultaneously using all of your processor cores.
• Dual Screen Support - FastStone provides optimization for dual screen users. You can also drag and drop images or your main window onto any of the monitors.
• Drag-and-drop function - Manage images, copy, move, reorder files using the drag and drop function.

Pricing

Here are the costs for four different FastStone photo management, sorting, and filing products (all licenses are available for life):

• FastStone Image Viewer: $34.95
• FastStone Capture: $19.95
• FastStone MaxView: $19.95
• FastStone Photo Resizer: $19.95

The Faststone Image Viewer and Photo Resizer tools are free for personal and educational use, while FastStone Capture and MaxView require a license. However, you need support for all tools if you are using them for commercial purposes.

You can try FastStone Capture and MaxView free for 30 days.

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8. Phototheca.

Phototheca is a photo organization software that allows you to organize, view, sort, edit, and share images and videos on your computer.

For starters, you can get images from multiple sources like drives, NAS, network shares, memory cards, and smartphones. Then create a multi-level photo library, albums, folders, events, and smart folders.

Finally, organize your photos using a timeline, events, calendars, embedded folders, and more, and tag them using keywords and locations. The tagging function makes it easier to find images in the future. In addition, the dual display function allows you to use the second screen and organize photos with more space.

Features

• Smart Albums - This feature allows you to gather all photos that meet your specific criteria.
• Viewing capabilities - Phototheca allows you to zoom in and out on your images or switch to full screen mode. You can also start a slideshow to view all images smoothly.
• Face recognition - Simply tag your photos, and its AI technology will recognize the same person in your photo collection and group them into an album.

Pricing

Phototheca offers three paid plans (one-time payment):

• Home: $39.95, manages up to 100,000 photos
• Pro: $49.95, manages up to 250,000 photos.
• Premium: $54.95, manages an unlimited number of photos.

You get a 30-day money-back guarantee for all plans. In addition, students receive a 50% discount and all educational institutions receive a 20% discount.

9. PicaJet.

The best solution for multi-user access ($59.95 for a single license).

PicaJet is a photo management, sorting, and organizing and image database software that allows you to organize, edit, and sort your digital collection. You can organize photos into an unlimited number of category nesting levels - these can be complex or simple category structures.

Multiple users can access photos at the same time using their servers. However, only one user can change the content of the database at a time.

You can use different icons to categorize images, making it easy to find specific photos within a comprehensive collection. It also allows you to store images in your local memory while keeping smaller thumbnails on your PC's hard drive. This feature saves your PC's storage space and helps you access images by clicking directly on the small thumbnails.

PicaJet supports over 60 image files and image formats including JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, BMP, etc. In addition, it supports all RAW file formats from Sony, Nikon, Canon cameras, etc.

Plus, you can import, manage, and play videos from all major formats like MPEG2, MPEG4, AVI, etc.

The ability to hide private images is another useful feature. You can hide images by simply pressing Shift+Ctrl+H and authorize anyone you want.

Features

• Fast photo indexing - PicaJet uses OpenGL graphics acceleration and image processing techniques to index your photo collection by importing metadata information. OpenGL also allows images to be zoomed in and out smoothly with a single click.
• Backup and restore - It automatically backs up your photos and videos. And if your hard drive crashes or gets corrupt, restore all photos or videos with a single click.
• Slideshow software - The built-in slideshow software allows you to create slideshows with various transition effects similar to Hollywood-style effects.

Pricing

PicaJet offers two types of licenses (one-time payment):

• Single license: 59.95
• Family license: $99.95 (to be installed on up to five computers)

10. Movavi Photo Manager.

Ideal for businesses that want to sort images in various formats ($39.95).

The Movavi Photo Manager helps you manage and edit your entire photo collection. The software supports all major image formats like JPEG, PNG, RAW, etc.

Their software detects similar faces and automatically compiles them into an album. You can then edit these images simultaneously or delete and organize them in batches. The facial recognition feature also detects photos from across the collection and creates separate albums for each person.

Additionally, you can also add tags to your photos to find specific images and navigate the gallery. Movavi Photo Manager also backs up your photos, albums, tags, and locations. This feature helps you to restore your data if it is lost.

The photo editor allows you to edit one or more photos at the same time. Plus, you get all the essential photo editing features, such as cropping, rotating, sharpening, flipping, straightening horizons, and more.

Features

• Geolocation - Movavi Photo Manager automatically sorts photo albums based on where they were taken. You can also filter albums by city.
• Duplicate photos - It scans your PC's hard drive and removes all identical photos.
• Automatic album creation - The photo manager sorts all your images and creates albums based on the date and GPS coordinates.

Pricing

Movavi Photo Manager offers three pricing plans for personal and business use:

Personal Plan

• Photo manager: $39.95
• Photo manager+photo editor: $59.95
• Photo manager + photo editor + slideshow maker: $79.95

Business Plan

• Photo manager: $99.95
• Photo manager+photo editor: $149.95
• Photo Manager + Photo Editor + Slideshow Maker: $199.95

All plans come with a 3-day free trial.

11. Zoner Photo Studio.

The best for photo editing ($4.99 per month)

Zoner is a photo organization software that has four sections: Manager, Develop, Editor, and Create. Its standard features include RAW processing, layer support, presets, and cataloging.

You can instantly copy images from your camera to the computer, and the software will organize them in different folders. You can also tag or rename your photos, add descriptions and keywords, and take quick backups all at once.

After tagging and organizing them, browse your media collection by dates, keywords, locations, folders, and more.

In addition, Zoner Photo Studio helps you improve your photos with its photo editor. The photo editor allows you to add colors to your photos, add a magical atmosphere, radial filters, and more.

Additionally, you can share your images directly from Zoner on social channels like Facebook, Twitter, Messenger, and more.

Features

• Disconnected drives - You can now access photos from disconnected and corrupt hard drives.
• Zoner Photo Cloud - This feature allows you to keep all of your photos securely in a cloud storage space. Basic plans give you up to 20GB of space. You can also get up to 1TB of storage for $19.99.
• Photo products - Get all your photo products delivered to your home for only $7.99 in the EU region and $19.99 in other regions.

Pricing

Zoner Photo Studio X costs $49 per year or $4.99 per month.

You can get a big discount if you want to buy their software for non-profit organizations, schools, government offices, and businesses.

What is a software for managing, sorting, and organizing photos?

In parallel with the evolution of digital photography, digital image management is constantly evolving.

The management of digital photos falls under Media Asset Management (MAM) and the Digital Asset Management (DAM). Whether they are minimalist, free or premium tools, there are numerous photo management, sorting and filing software on the market.

Essentially, photo management, sorting, and filing software helps you manage photo attribution requests, assign photo users, and create metadata that you can link to DAM records.

Other key benefits of photo management, sorting, and filing software include:

• They streamline the process of importing, presenting, and sharing images.
• Automatic updates and emails related to the mission.
• Complete the metadata directly in the DAM.
• Follow completed missions through a searchable database.
• You can also use it to manage videos.

Additionally, modern photo management, sorting, and organizing tools also allow you to share, save, and edit photos via mobile applications. The artificial intelligence technology found in some software can also help you sort and manage images more efficiently.

What should you look for in photo management, sorting, and filing software?

Here are some common considerations you need to know before buying a photo management, sorting, and filing tool.

1. Artificial intelligence - It's nice to have features like facial recognition and object recognition. These AI-based functions can help you quickly sort images and search using factors like events, names, objects, etc. That means you don't have to remember relevant keywords to search for an image.
2. Mobile application - Modern smartphones are now equipped with powerful cameras, and it's not uncommon for us to click on our images directly through our phones. That's why a mobile app can be useful to instantly capture, store, share, or edit photos and videos. You can also use it to manage, export, or share files and images.
3. Research capacity - Your image bank can reach thousands or even six figures. The possibilities are endless! So you need to be able to quickly search for your images using a wide range of factors, including tags, locations, geotags, ratings, labels, and more.
4. RAW format support - An ideal photo management, sorting and organizing platform should allow you to store RAW images directly from your digital camera to the software. Additionally, you should be able to store large photos without having to transfer them to your laptop.
5. Wireless stand - It's a bargain if you don't like wires. You can transfer all your data transparently thanks to a WiFi connection.
6. Photo editing features - Editing options like exposure correction, brightness, contrast, and lens correction can help you edit images more quickly without the need for standalone photo editing software.

Summary.

Here are some of my top picks when it comes to photo management, sorting, and filing software. Most of these tools offer photo editing functions as well as management, sorting, and filing services.

Organizing your photos and other media groups is essential to seeking clarity, whether at an individual or corporate level.

If you want to manage your images only on the web, I suggest using Google Photos. It's a great free tool that offers all the essential photo organization features.

For the best photo management, sorting, and organizing software, opt for Adobe Bridge. The fact that you get all the other tools in Adobe Creative Cloud with Adobe Bridge is a big advantage.

The main reason Adobe Bridge is my best choice is due to features like:

• It allows you to add keywords, tags, and reviews to your photos.
• Powerful filters and advanced metadata search features.
• Integrate stock photos into Adobe Stock with Adobe Bridge.
• Rename or export your photos in bulk with various scale and size options.

In the end, review all the tools and choose the one that fits your budget and your photo management, sorting, and filing needs.