Manage your photo's easily with Pictomio
There are some fantastic professional photo manager's available, applications such as Adobe's Lightroom and Apples Aperture, which offer a number of powerful features. Unfortunately, these professional suites aren't cheap, and although you may be an enthusiastic photographer, it may still be difficult to justify the expense. Many of the free managers that are available offer very basic functionality but there are other options available.
Pictomio 1.2.29 is a freeware photo management application that may not be as feature rich as Lightroom but will still enable you to achieve professional looking results. The application is more than capable of cataloging, managing, and editing your images, and even providing reference information about each of your photographs.
Pictomio 1.2.29 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 
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
