Photo organizing software are programs that help you manage images, store them in order and delete the needless ones. It’s common for photographers to have hundreds and even thousands of images spread across random folders on a dozen different devices.
Instead of wasting your time trying to manage all of those images yourself, it’s better to use an organizer.
If you are an ordinary photographer with a limited budget who is searching for an effective picture manager and even free photo editor, you can check out some free photo management software that I’ve already tested. Here’s a list free photo organizing software for Windows and Mac that will help you organize your collection of images and make their searching easier.
Verdict: Bridge CC is a free photo organizing software that provides central access to all files and resources that are needed to work with creative projects.
You’ll find a lot of functions here like organizing and storing HDR and panoramic images, organizing individual and general resources, convenient batch photo editing, adding watermarks, adjustment of color settings, and even uploading photos to Adobe Stock.
Adobe Bridge supports HIDPI and Retina screens and has a scaling function.
Verdict: Google Photos is a photo organizer software that automatically creates backup copies of your image folders. You can also select specific catalogs you want to upload to the cloud.
Google Photos organizes images by date and offers suggestions on which files should be archived. Additionally, you can turn on backup copying and device synchronization to view specific folders and upload them to your Google Photos account, where they’ll be displayed as a timeline thanks to the AI-Assistant function.
You can create albums, collages, and videos using the Uploads menu. Lastly, this service allows organizing HDR and panoramic pictures.
Verdict: StudioLine Photo Basic 4 is a photo organizer for Windows that offers good photo editing tools and flexible database archiving.
Here you can edit photographs using such tools as exposure correction, "red-eye" effect removal, cropping, rotation, visual effects, and automatic tone levels.
As for organizing, you can make use of the expanded image editing tools and slideshow creation provided by this free photo organizing software for PC. You can control your entire image collection by adding tags, descriptions, GPS-coordinates, and more.
StudioLine can even import images from cameras and scanners, and copy photos to CD/DVDs.
Verdict: JetPhoto Studio is a full-featured and free photo management program that allows you to organize folders, add comments, categorize, and view data.
JetPhoto Studio is one of the best free photo organizing software that contains most tools needed for editing and organizing images such as album management, tags, and geotagging, but its biggest advantage is the ability to use the app for sharing photos. The list of available options includes Flickr, the JetPhoto Server, and the ability to create Google Map galleries with images and geotags.
You can also quickly create Flash-galleries and slideshows for web-design, and view them by using an appropriate player or browser with Flash support.
Verdict: Terra Proxx comes with handy functions that help you keep image folders in order. This photo organizing software is very simple and it’s suitable even for inexperienced users. It contains a huge pack of sorting and filtering options. Besides, many digital photographers will appreciate the ability to display EXIF data.
You can also use this program to delete duplicate pictures and rename multiple files. With these tools, you can easily arrange and structure your photo folders. This program is a great option for Windows users.
Verdict: XnViewMP is a fast, free graphical browser and image viewer that supports more than 500 image formats. Whether you’re sorting the ubiquitous JPEG or PNG files or working with lesser-known image formats, XnViewMP will do the work for you.
Even though it doesn’t organize files automatically, it has tools for batch editing the metadata and tags of your images, which allows you to quickly assign tags to a ton of photos.
With XnViewMP, you can change the resolution of the photos and reduce the file size. You can also view your image library in different modes like a full-screen preview or a filmstrip.
This picture organizing software allows you to rename and convert images in batch mode, as well as find and deal with duplicate files.
Verdict: Eagle is a convenient service that allows you to organize your images and search for specific photos by various parameters. You can use it for storing your collections of pictures, mockups, screenshots, and other graphics. In addition, it’s suitable for managing and organizing Vimeo and YouTube links that can be previewed using its in-built tools.
You can drag and drop photos from other applications or folders and then organize them using this app. Eagle lets you add tags to your photos or groups of images to facilitate the search. After organizing your collection, you will quickly find any asset you need. The app enables you to automatically filter your images by name or tags. In addition, you can use any number of categories for your digital assets.
What makes Eagle better than third-party photo catalog software is that it comes with a set of AI-based tools. Using the Color Filter, you can add convenient color labels to your images and sort them easily. You can also search for digital assets by format, resolution, and tags as well as use many other specific criteria.
Verdict: FastStone Image Viewer is one of the best photo viewers for Mac and Windows, that can be used as a browser, converter, and image editor.
FastStone is supplied with a plethora of photo editing tools for basic manipulations and precise adjustments and supports tag creation, EXIF data viewing, and other parameters for commenting and sorting images.
This picture organizing software is compatible with nearly all file formats out there. Additionally, it receives frequent updates to offer you the best experience possible.
Verdict: WidsMob is efficient software for viewing and organizing photo albums with a library mode.
You can choose from three panoramic and two circular scene views. Besides, there are six digital stitch options: radial blur, noise, deskew, kelty, blend, grid, and normal. These digital stitches are suitable for creating panoramic images or stitched scenes in a wide variety of sizes.
One of the peculiarities is the integrated panoramic stitching option. You can change the settings and light contrast. You can even adjust the red-eye effect, focus on the eyes, alter blue and white balance.
Verdict: Magix Photo Manager is a simple, fast, and intuitive free photo organizer for Windows. It helps you classify, manage, and share your photo library by using the expanded import functionality and efficient image organizing tools.
Additionally, it’s supplied with a smart filter for quick, automatic sorting. For instance, you can categorize images by name, date, or thematic tags.
MAGIX is one of the best photo album software on the market, which is why it includes a series of tools for image post-processing and has a powerful built-in graphics editor.
The free version doesn’t include such advanced functions like panoramic editing or automatic image categorization. Additionally, you have to register before you can start using the trial version.
Verdict: Phototheca stays on par with Terra Proxx photo organizer software and allows viewing, sorting, systemizing, and sharing thousands of digital images and videos with ease. It also lets you import photos from various devices and posting them on social networks.
After importing your photographs to the Phototheca database, you can sort them by event, related images, photos taken on the same day, or saved in the same folder, with all of them displayed on the timeline. Next, you can mark the photos, move them to other events, or sort between your user-created albums.
Verdict: DigiKam is a multiplatform photo organizing software to manage open-source pictures with a multifunction Windows port. Your collection can be sorted by folders, albums, or with the help of tags.
Comments, ratings, and other metadata can be viewed, edited, and saved in the SQLite database or organized as a file. The built-in lighting table and RAW support simplify the comparison, and plug-in support adds even more features.
You can automatically rename and rotate images while importing them. You can also create filters for albums.
The disadvantage is that the application is still being developed, and it is not very stable in Windows.
Verdict: This free photo management software has convenient cataloging, with correction of several photos at once. It allows sorting photographs by several convenient categories, importing images from cameras, scanners, and other devices, as well as creating albums, applying changes, and performing batch actions.
Other important advantages of this option that make it possibly the best free photo organizer
include high-speed performance, which is achieved thanks to using the GPU's 3D-accelerator to the max, and the ability to create slideshows and web galleries.
PicaJet supports various formats, e.g. RAW files, can optimize images before sending them via email and create web-galleries based on templates. It also supports video files like AVI, QuickTime, MPEG2, ASF, MPEG4, etc.
Verdict: Photo Organizer is a photo organizing software that allows you to organize and easily find digital photos. It contains loads of tools for batch editing, freeing up space, and relieving you from having to sort the images manually.
Photo Organizer can efficiently put photos in a separate library or a single specified destination after scanning the whole system or a specific folder. The software allows moving images or simply copying them to the destination folder, leaving the original photos untouched.
Renaming several images is both easy and quick and can be done by sorting the subfolder criteria.
The software also lets you free up space on your device by deleting duplicate images. The fast scan mechanism uses algorithms for quickly finding identical photographs.
Verdict: Zoner Photo Studio X is a free photo organizing software that allows you to import, organize, and edit images.
After importing photos from your camera, Zoner will automatically sort them into different folders. Other than your camera, you can also easily import files from your smartphone or tablet.
This software can rename, mark, and even create backup copies of images.
Zoner is one of the best photo catalog software programs, as it saves all the necessary information about the photographs in the database called the Catalogue, which makes photo organizing more efficient.
You can sort your images based on date, color labels, keywords, and other attributes. You can also add GPS-coordinates to your photos, and later use them to find photos based on location.
Verdict: Picktorial is a great program for organizing your pictures with the possibility of editing them in the same window.
Picktorial has one convenient feature - direct work with the file system of your computer. It means you don’t have to create folders or directories in the program itself. You can rate, rank, apply presets, at the same time when you are selecting photos.
If you want to do color correction during photo management, then it can offer quite decent tools for both quick and in-depth work. Tools for image retouching are especially useful.
Verdict: Movavi Photo Manager uses a tag system to quickly find a group of photos. Users can add their own marks in the corresponding section on the main screen of the utility and assign them to any pictures.
This free photo organizing software recognizes the faces in the photos and automatically creates an album of images for each person.
There is a built-in graphical editor for quick photo processing. However, it has only standard functions - renaming, cropping, leveling the horizon, rotation, and automatic color correction.
Verdict: Apowersoft Photo Viewer supports various image formats and PDF files. This program supports professional image formats like HEIC (HEIF), PSD, CDR, RAW, etc. You can also save files in more common and widespread formats: PNG, JPG, BMP, TIFF, etc.
In addition to image viewing, you can also take screenshots and edit pictures. The photo uploading process takes only several seconds. The program interface is easy.
This photo organizer software doesn’t require a lot of resources and doesn’t put a heavy load on the processor. You can view images smoothly even on low-end PCs.
Apowersoft Photo Viewer also offers free cloud storage. After uploading an image, you’ll receive links for it that will allow you to share the image in a matter of seconds.
Verdict: It is an open-source image viewer that supports multiple platforms. You can use the set of tools to work with all common graphics formats, including RAW and PSD images. It can view images in zip files and MS Office and allows you to extract them to catalogs.
You can get this photo organizing software and use it to add notes to images. The program also generates preview miniatures for currently opened folders and has a file explorer panel that allows you to switch between folders.
Nomacs includes image manipulation tools for adjusting brightness, contrast, tone, gamma, and exposure.
The program is compatible with Windows, Linux, and Mac systems.
Verdict: XnView is an effective multimedia viewer, browser, and photo converter. It supports more than 500 photo formats. There are no ads or spyware.
The software has all the basic functions. It also provides a screen capture module and Windows TWAIN & WIA interface to capture images.
This option can be considered the best free photo organizer due to the inclusion of such functions as color settings, image resizing, cropping, metadata editing (IPTC, XMP), and several others. You also gain access to features like batch renaming, batch converter, duplicate image search, photo comparison, and it is even possible to create contact lists and slideshows.
Verdict: This software gives you the opportunity to organize and view multimedia files. That means you can work with images, audio files, or videos.
The program was created to watch movies, listen to music, and view graphics in a slideshow with various available effects. Image files in a folder can be displayed in several ways, including thumbnails. This allows you to see which images you have without opening the files.
Verdict: Pictomio is an image viewer that allows searching for photos on your hard drive and viewing them as presentations.
The feature that makes this option arguably the best free photo organizing software is that it transforms all your photographs into 3D images, adding a cool and unique look to your collection.
The software consists of several parts: a photo browser, a slideshow editor, and a slideshow viewer.
Pictomio allows users to sort images by topic, date, rating, and category while enabling you to see every single pixel in detail thanks to the liquid zooming feature. You can also view the images as a slideshow if you don’t need more advanced features included in this option.
Verdict: ACDSee is one of the best tools for organizing and managing photos since it offers a convenient organization system that includes ratings, tags, categories, keywords and color markings.
Besides, this free photo organizer has advanced import functions and offers amazing batch editing tools such as resizing, rotating, exposure adjustments, renaming, and several others.
Folder navigation can be easily done using the mouse wheel. However, it’s a bit oversensitive and you can scroll through some files without even noticing it.
ACDSee allows viewing files inside ZIP-archives without extracting them. You can also use ACDSee to perform basic image editing.
Verdict: Tonfotos has proven to be one of my best programs for organizing family photos. Its intuitive navigation and automatic facial recognition have made managing my trip albums much easier and more enjoyable. I don’t need to spend hours manually tagging photos, thanks to Tonfotos' artificial intelligence that automatically identifies my family and friends in the pictures.
You’ll be surprised I can even gather genealogical information of people who were on photos that was added as a special feature. Now, I can see the connections between people, which has enriched my experience with the photos.
The flexibility to store my photos wherever I want, without depending on a specific cloud service, has been very convenient. Furthermore, the licensing options offer a good balance between functionality and price.
Verdict: IrfanView is a compact photo manager with a viewer utility that offers various tools and options for organizing and enhancing photographs.
IrfanView allows quickly viewing photos on your computer and creating slideshows. The program also offers a multifunctional image editor, batch image conversion, and a scanner interface. If you feel like you need even more features, you can expand this software with plug-ins.
All IrfanView functions can be easily mastered since the program has a somewhat outdated, yet still very practical interface. You can use various hotkey combinations to speed up your workflow even further. Additionally, the catalog viewer allows easily switching between folders and finding the required file.
Verdict: Choose this software if you need a simple, powerful, and modern image viewer based on Qt. It has an open source code and is completely free for all users.
All PhotoQt functions are easy to use. If something confuses you, take a look at the settings or refer to an online manual for help. Almost everything can be configured and each of the tools is accompanied by a brief explanatory text.
This picture organizing software is compatible with a lot of graphic formats (you can use GraphicsMagick, Libraw, FreeImage, DevIL, Poppler), and supports touchscreen controls.
PhotoQt offers an extremely convenient UI, which makes this program both quick and flexible.
