Phototheca

With our digital pictures growing in numbers by the hour, keeping our personal photos and other images organized using a standard Windows folder structure is no longer an option.

Phototheca offers you a pro-looking solution designed to provide a useful and efficient structure to all photo collections, regardless of their size or purpose. Besides, the program includes extensive editing features for both the photos themselves and their metadata.

If your photo collection does not hold more than 5,000 items and all you’re looking for is a clear folder-like structure and some basic editing features, the program’s free edition may well be all you need. If you wish to make the most of its extensive functionality, though, you’ll have to upgrade to the Pro or Premium editions. Except for the amount of photos that the program can handle (5,000 in the free edition, 250,000 in the Pro version and an unlimited amount in the Premium edition), the differences in functionality among the various versions are not really clear. I guess that if you want to make use of some of the most interesting features described in the developers’ website, you have no other option than going Premium.

I’ll leave aside the program’s organizing capabilities, its photo viewing options, and the basic editing features – present in the free version and in most if not all similar photo organizers – to focus on Phototheca’s not-so-common features. When it comes to importing photos to your collection, the program will take nearly any format available, including a number of RAW options and all the most common video codecs. Besides, the program includes excellent tagging capabilities, supporting EXIF, IPTC, and XMP metadata, and uses this information to boost its search engine and the various search filters it provides.

The program detects portraits, analyzes the faces in them, and offers you to organize them by person... or animal. It detects also any duplicates taking up space on your disks and your collection, and removes them to free up space. Phototheca can protect your most valuable images by putting them on a virtual safe that only you can access – an excellent feature for professional photographers that need to protect their creativity.

Phototheca can be a useful photo organizer for both amateur and professional photographers. It combines simplicity with a wealth of features and utilities that pro users require to keep their collections neatly tagged and safe.