Despite its name, Digital Photo Organizer does not function as most other photo organization tools we’ve reviewed do. It doesn’t generate a database of photos, let you search or modify EXIF metadata, or put them into a “contact sheet” where you can rapidly view large numbers of images. In fact, it’s more like a more general file management utility with some photo and video previewing features thrown in. That’s fine and all, but it may not be useful for people who are looking for a way to rapidly index or search through existing photo archives–you know, the things you need to do to truly organize photos.
Digital Photo Organizer offers users six basic features: An “Automatic sorter” which lets you sort a large list of images by the creation date, and/or by the EXIF “Camera” or “Size” values embedded in the images; a “Batch renamer” which does exactly what it says; a “single renamer” which displays image thumbnails and can rename a single file at a time (why you would need a special utility to do this is beyond me); a “duplicate finder” that searches for files in a single folder that may be identical but have different file names; a “name replacer” which, as far as I can tell is just a subset of features of the “renamer” function; and an “Extensions manager” that also is a subset of the “renamer” function, only dealing specifically with file extensions.
The demo version I tested has certain very obnoxious restrictions and limitations that inhibit its ability to work with files. The Batch renamer will append “Unregistered copy of DPO – Please register” to every fifth file in the batch. The sorter feature lets you see only the first 35 files in the sorted file list; The Name replacer and Extensions manager functions display only a preview of the first 99 files that the program will make modifications on; And the demo version of Digital Photo Organizer displays a very persistent nag window that impedes your ability to use the program every three minutes or so. A full-featured, time-limited demo would be a better way to allow users to evaluate the software.
While there appear to be some useful file renaming features in Digital Photo Organizer, the demo significantly restricts the usefulness of those features– and I’m not sure they’re worth $20 regardless. A less photo-centric utility, ReNamer, offers far more powerful renaming and sorting features than Digital Photo Organizer does, lacking only the thumbnail previews in the “Single Renamer” tab–which is something you can do without any special application, within Windows Explorer.
–Andrew Brandt