Since the invention of the digital camera back in the early 90s and the rise of computers, software for photo management has become an essential part of a professional photographer’s setup. Especially in 2021, you rarely find photographers dedicated to the craft that doesn’t use photo management software.
Today, photo management software is a tool that allows photographers to organize, search, and do other things with the photographs they upload on their computers. They can be used by all photographers, from newbies to professionals, and even ones that belong in organizations. They’re essential to increasing work efficiency, and overall they help improve the convenience of handling hundreds or thousands of photographs.
In this blog, we’ll be delving deeper into the specifics of photo management, what it can do for you, how difficult or easy it is to use one, and of course, along the way, we’ll be providing five practical reasons to use software for photo management.
Reason Number 1: Convenience
Don’t you find it annoying when you have to scroll through so many photos on your phone, checking every single one of them to see what you can delete and what you can’t? Don’t you hate it when you tap somewhere on your phone, and you have to start all over again? Imagine that, but having to annoyingly open filenames manually that all start with “IMG_01***” a hundred times. This is where software for photo management helps. It provides convenience by allowing users access to tools that help accelerate and make organization easier.
Image manipulation, arguably one of the best features in most photo editing software, helps you select a particular part of your images that you want to edit. Image manipulation essentially allows you to bring many changes to a selected position without affecting the other parts of the picture. Standard tools that help out with image manipulation are the marquee tool, magic wand, and lasso. They each do specific things that help you single out a part in the image that you want to work on without altering the other parts of the pictures. This is extremely helpful when you want to work on an image like red-eye or edit out a wrinkle on a model’s clothing.
Reason Number 2: Efficiency
Suppose your photo management software is a good one. In that case, you can utilize Digital Asset Management software that allows you to do many things, like storing photos in a secure and easy-to-access location. It also helps organize and locate files through the utilization of searchable metadata, sharing files quickly with links, tracking metrics, and cropping, resizing, or converting photos to other file formats. These are great, especially for those working in a company or an organization that works with thousands of images over the year.
This level of efficiency, compared to singling out thousands of images, is very drastic. If your organization or company is growing (it most likely will), you must work with a solid photo management system that can be done through photo management software. With DAM software and a working system, you’ll only have to expand your library and space even when you continue to grow, but you won’t have to worry about automizing.
An integrated and robust solution of tools will help you as an individual and your team if you have one. They streamline your workflow and increase adoption rates by ten folds by keeping your users actively utilizing the tools they’ve already come to learn.
Reason Number 3: Data Compression
For websites, it’s essential to be able to load photos quickly. A straightforward way to achieve this is by compressing your images before uploading. However, just compressing your images will reduce the quality of the files most of the time. Using image editing options and tools available in software allows you to compress images without losing the initial quality of the pictures, which is very important.
Compressing your data means that you won’t need as much storage space required for each photo. If you need less storage space for each photo, you’ll have the opportunity to store more images and spend less on storage space. This is important when you’re dealing with thousands of images which means you’ll have to take care of your preciously managed storage. Still, it’s also equally as crucial for new photographers as they won’t have to spend more for storage when they aren’t earning money out of photography, and they might not want to spend that much in the first place for something they aren’t committed to yet.
Reason Number 4: Image Enhancement
Although we’ve already discussed a form or two of image enhancements above, we mean a different aspect of image enhancement. With the efficiency and convenience provided by photo management software, you’ll end up with more time to work on your actual images than the ones manually culling and organizing their files.
You’ll be able to focus more on telling a story, on editing your images the way you want to, and if you’re managing a group of people, the creative teams and the marketing teams will be able to have more time to use the right tools and focus on what matters. In addition, with shareable and secure files, spreading them will be easy and will no longer distract users for a long time.
Reason Number 5: Non-destructive Workflow
With the best editing software for photo management, you won’t have to worry about a destructive workflow. No editing will end up modifying the original image regardless of the file type. JPG, DNG, RAW, PSD, TIFF, etc., all of them will stay their original files. In addition, all the changes you’ll make on your images will be stored either in an external XMP file or in a catalog file as a list of adjustments which means you can go back at any time and revert or undo the modifications made to images.
Conclusion:
A great photographer’s best friend is their camera, but good photo management software is still close. With all the benefits of photo management software, it’s easy to see why everyone is already using it or planning to use it.
