Hi Mcluma
I mainly use Picasa to organise my photos on the pc , you just install it and it will search for all images on your machine and then you can view them , and search through them , its quite capable at that .
You can even view photos on a timeline so if you go back to the year when you know an event happened you should find the right photo quickly.
For editing it is basic , but actually very user friendly and without all unneccesary bells and whistles , so its quick to use where you just want to correct problems , crop images down to size , or export to web .
If you need more serious and capable editing and creative features there are free programs , but Paint shop Pro , Photoshop and Adobe Elements are all good but not free . Photoshop is the industry standard and i was introduced to it last year having used Elements for a couple of years and PSP since i had my first digi in 1999 infact.
Using layers is a feature of all these and it opens up lots of possibilites and some fun too with head swopping etc .
Tagging is a great feature which you get with Adobe photo album and probably others too , you can label a photo with multiple labels or tags
so for example Family could be a tag on a photo and the same photo
could be tagged holiday . You can then search for your photos of family hols , or perhaps all photos of your cat ... whatever you takes your fancy.
Its avery powerful feature , but you need to be disciplined or it can run away with you .
Photoshop is just brilliant and so capable , you could spend years learning its hidden depths , i am no expert myself , i spent many hours of frustration getting to a basic level initially!!
As always there's horses for courses so it just depends what you want to achieve with a program . I would say if you have straightforward needs dont buy a program , try picasa first.
http://picasa.google.com/
For myself i have been known to tend to take alot of photos being an occasional hobby photographer , so i find having them organized is very necessary , my ideal will be when i can dump them all on a massive hard drive sat next to my wi-fi router and so they are not all clogging up my laptop , whilst i can access them all when i want to at a click of a mouse .
Oooh i do go on a bit sometimes ':lol:'
Cheers David
