There are plenty of free image and photo management tools, that enable you to categorise and store your photos, as well as basic image manipulation and enhancement. However, if you've recently upgraded to a semi-professional digital camera, it could be the time to take your photos more seriously. For this, you need a professional level photo manager and two of the most popular products are Apple Aperture and Adobe Lightroom.

Adobe Lightroom 2 is now available and it's a cross-platform product, so you can use it on both a PC and a Mac, whereas Apple's Aperture is a Mac OS X only photo manager. The latest Adobe Lightroom 2 contains a number of new features, including improved image enhancement tools and more.

Adobe Lightroom 2 link.

We're big fans of pushing portability. Indeed, so are others, too. Did anyone see the feature in the Sunday Times, at the weekend? People are starting to realise that you can whack all your favourite applications, work files, documents and more, on a portable USB stick or iPod and then take this and work on any host computer. You could go one step further and forget the applications and use the rising number of online tools such as Zoho and the new Adobe Photoshop Express web service.

Adobe Photoshop Express is a web-only service that enables you to import and edit your photos. You can also link to your Facebook account, Piscasa album and more. Great for basic image editing, but the first thing we tried to do was to crop an image to a particular dimension. Not possible. So, for any serious photo editing, you may need to look elsewhere. Adobe Photoshop Express does ship with 2GB of free storage, if you want to use it for storing various images and photos.

Do you remember the old iView Media? This was a professional-level media and photo manager for the Mac and Windows platform that was bought by Microsoft a couple of years ago. This has been integrated in to the Microsoft Expression range of products and has had a few minor visual updates to the user-interface. To me, an old user of iView, it looks worse than the original version. Will be interesting to see how the Mac version stacks up, visually.

Microsoft Expression Media 2 is the first public preview of the forthcoming major revision to their photo and image manager. It ships with a host of new features, including additional support for media formats and more. They've removed the requirement for QuickTime to be installed.

Microsoft Expression Media 2 public preview link.

We've mentioned this a few times, but there is so much free photo management software, that commercial developers have to do something a little special to get noticed. To be fair, Adobe and Apple have achieved this with Lightroom and Aperture, offering advanced tools for the semi and professional photographer. These two tools stand out from many apps for this reason. However, iPhoto is enough for most Mac users and tools such as Picasa are excellent Windows photo editing tools.

ACDSee Photo Editor 2008 is a public preview of the forthcoming photo manager that enables you to download and test the new features and offer feedback. Whether this means you can shape the design of the new app is questionable. It probably means that you're beta-testing the new features and can offer feedback on how they perform on your system.

ACDSee Photo Editor 2008 link.

Even using the very best digital camera, there are times when you'll need a paint program to touch-up your pictures. You won't want to give these to your friends when they look like they're taken by an amateur. There are quite a few commercial paint packages available. You're almost spoilt for choice. The snag with most commercial packages is that they're updated irregularly. Buy the latest version and you'll have to wait until the next version until any new features are included. With shareware or freeware, you'll often find the developers release new updates on a monthly basis.

Paint.NET 3.22 is a free paint and photo editing tool that's updated regularly. The latest version ships with a 'noise reduction' effect as well as a number of bug fixes.

There are times when you go on the road and someone needs a photo, an image resizing or part of the website re-working. However, the snag is that you've forgotten to bring your photo editor, so you can't make the changes. This can leave you stressed and feeling that - being out of the office - is stopping you from doing your work. There is an answer though, you could simply use an online editor to make the changes you require to the photo you need editing.

Snipshot is a tool that you can use to make changes to photos, whether they are located on your computer or hosted online. Simply post the web technology to the image URL and it will open in your editor for you to resize, add various effects and then export. You can even use it to open and work with RAW images.

Snipshot link.

We spend months taking photos and storing them on our computer. The snag is, how do you get your photos across to your friends and family? You might want to share the 40 photos you took when you were on your visit to Dublin, but can't print them off nor can you justify trying to send them by email. They're simply too large. The best alternative is to upload them to a photo-sharing website and then enable your friends to have access. Flickr is one of the best around and, if you have a large number of photos, you'll need a tool to get them online, quickly.

Flickr Uploadr 3 is a the latest version of the official photo uploader that will enable you to select the photos you want to put on your Flickr account, select whether you want to make them available to the public or private use, then upload to a new or existing set on your account.

Flickr Uploadr 3 link.

Your broadband provider offered you free web space when you signed up, but how many of us bother to use the space. It's too small for backing up our data and there's not enough bandwidth to provide files to our friends and family. For this reason, our space goes unused and  we resort to sending our photos and home movies to our friends by post or by email. If the other user has a slow connection, they're not going to be pleased if they receive a large email with an attachment of your latest holiday photos.

Pictobrowser is an online tool that will enable you to put a Flickr-based slideshow on your homepage. You simply need a Flickr account, group together the photos you want to appear on the page and a basic idea of how you want your slideshow to be used on your page. Put in the relevant details and copy the supplied code to your homepage and watch it go live.

Pictobrowser link.

A while back, Adobe decided to release a free version of their photo management software, to gain a quick foothold in the emerging digital photography market. Adobe Photoshop Album Starter Edition was the result and it limited you to managing a small number of your digital photos as a preview to the commercial edition. Sadly Adobe Photoshop Album is no longer available, so there is no direct upgrade path from the free Starter Edition, but it's been primarily updated so it will take advantaged of Vista.

Adobe Photoshop Album Starter Edition 3.2 is an ideal tool for you to get in to managing your digital photos. You can catalogue, enhance and share. With the latest 3.2, you can now import your photos from your digtial camera as well as support for Vista.

Only a few short years ago, anyone producing digital photography software, magazines, websites or other literature, couldn't go wrong. People couldn't get enough of the latest information about what camera they should use and how they could get the most from their camera. The market has flattened somewhat, yet there are still software developers producing new photo management and sharing tools, although few compete with iPhoto on the Mac and are never as feature-packed as Adobe Lightroom or Aperture.

Photology 1.0.0.102 is yet another photo management tool that ships with a rather unique user-interface. It attempts to make management, editing and sharing, easy. It's clearly aimed at the consumer and would be superb if it was free software. However, it's commercial and only ships as a 14-day trial. Our advice? Try it and see how it stacks up against your current photo management software.