Yesterday I promised to tell you more about the software I’ve found so helpful for organizing photos.  PhotoDirector, by CyberLink, is what I’ve been using.

This thing has some amazing features!  My very favorite is tagging.  You can tag every photo with whatever tag(s) you want.  It’s even easy to batch-tag.  For instance, you can click on the first photo from 4th of July, then shift-click on the last to select everything in between.  Add the tag “4th of July.” Deselect everything and use the same process to select all of the fireworks photos.  Add the tag “fireworks.”  Deselect again, and then you can individually select each photo and add tags for whatever people are in the photos.  Now, when you want to find any of these pictures, you just search for the tags!

All by itself, this feature would make the software worthwhile for me.  Without this, and with  hundreds of photos on my hard drive, I can waste a lot of time looking for what I want.  Especially if it’s not a date-specific subject like July 4th.  Tagging makes it very easy.

Tags aren’t the only way you can find your photos, though.  Initially, they’re displayed in date order.  You can assign them to color categories, and you can rate them by stars, and search via any of those methods.  All of the metadata is displayed with your photo — date taken, what camera was used, ISO, shutter speed, if you used a flash.  (If you’re just the family historian and take no further interest in “photography,” per se, you may not be interested in many of those things.  But I find that the date, at least, can be a huge help!)

There are several ways you can explore your photos.  You can view in thumbnail mode or purely as a list.  You can compare two pictures side-by-side.  If you need to, you can do some editing right from within the program.  I admit, I haven’t done much with this yet; I’ve not been brave enough!  Besides removing red eye (which I found it did effectively, but not as easily as some of my other programs), it will do a number of things that professional photographers might need.  It can, for instance, remove noise or eliminate unintentional vignetting.  As I said, I haven’t been gutsy enough to mess around with these features yet.  It’s safe to do so, though, because PhotoDirector always saves your original and edits a copy.  You can even compare the original to your edited version.

When your photo is the way you want it, you can easily upload to Facebook from right within the program!  This was super-easy.  (It does Flickr, too, but I haven’t tried that yet.)  The first time I uploaded to Facebook, I had to actually log into Facebook twice — once to allow the application itself and again to give permission for it to upload photos.  After that, it does everything from within PhotoDirector.  It will let you create a new album, or upload to an existing album, and you can add a description and everything just like you would in Facebook — except it’s faster and easier, and you don’t have to go to the site and log in first.

I found the interface, overall, to be very intuitive.  When I did run into something I wasn’t totally sure of, I was always able to find what I needed in the help file.

This would be a truly excellent tool to employ as part of your monthly “recap,” when you decide what you need to have printed and what’s going to go into what album layouts.  Tag your photos while you’re at it, and you’ll very easily be able to find them later!

Disclosure: CyberLink provided me with a copy of PhotoDirector to facilitate this review.  As always, all opinions expressed here are entirely my own.