Collectorz.com Photo Collector

Is your photo collection too big to control? Let Photo Collector help you get a handle on it. It's a simple-to-use photo manager that makes it easy to find, view, and print your photos.

When you first launch Photo Collector, you may be a bit confused, because you won't see your photos in it. You first need to create a new database, and then point the program at the location of your photos. After you do that, Photo Collector imports your photos, and it does it quite quickly.

Once your photos are imported, you can view them in a variety of ways. Particularly helpful is the ability to view by year; the program automatically categorizes them that way for you. You can then browse your collection via thumbnails, and for each thumbnail see important information, including color depth, height and width, size, and so on. You can also edit the properties of any photo, including the subject matter, keywords, adding or changing ratings, and more. You can also print any photo, view it full screen, and perform very basic photo editing such as adjusting the color level, converting it to grey scale, resizing it, and rotating it. You can also create slide shows from your photos.

Although Photo Collector is a very nice and serviceable program, there are more powerful photo managing and editing tools out there--for free. Picasa, for example, offers more features than Photo Collector, and it's free. Photo Collector costs $30 (a Pro version costs $50), and you can use the trial/demo version to manage only 500 photos.

--Preston Gralla