Dave's Favorites: Organizing Your Photos With StudioLine Photo 2

How many pictures are on your hard disk? I have a few thousand, and it can get awfully frustrating to find the one I'm looking for.

There are a lot of choices out there for organizing image files, products such as Jasc Paint Shop Photo Album, Adobe Photoshop Album, and ACD Systems ACDSee. Another excellent, but less well-known, choice is StudioLine Photo 2 from H&M Software. It combines image cataloging with editing tools, slide shows, archiving, printing, and sharing.

I've used StudioLine before, and was impressed with the original version of the product. Version 2 has a slew of new features, including image backup and archiving, the ability to create Web galleries of your photos, and a dramatically overhauled interface.

It's the interface, in fact, that I find most interesting. There are no dialog boxes in which you accept or cancel changes to your images, for instance; everything happens immediately. Isn't that dangerous, you ask? Actually, it's quite safe for your pictures, because StudioLine is extremely careful never to make any changes to your originals. All modifications to your pictures are always stored externally, in something it calls a "filter stack," and you can work with any image in its edited or original form--even weeks or months after making changes. The elegance of the system is apparent when you try to e-mail a picture from within StudioLine and find that you can choose to send the original or edited version.

StudioLine has all the important bases covered. You'll find crop, zoom, rotation, color correction, and batch processing. You can copy images to a CD, a DVD, or a Web page with just a few clicks. There are also a lot of options for adding names and descriptions to your photos.

One major disappointment is that the program doesn't have a keyword painter like you'll find in Adobe's latest organizer. But StudioLine has the next best thing: After you add a description to a photo, with a single click you can tag other pictures with that text.

StudioLine Photo 2 is available from H&M Software for $44; you can also download a free trial.