Tech Talk: Picture of happiness

At least it is if you have a good photo database – one that catalogues your snaps and files them away neatly in a sort of digital shoebox, whilst at the same time displaying them attractively on screen.

Yet, good databases can be hard to find, especially if like me you have a collection running into tens of thousands. This is shoe-boxing on an Imelda Marcos scale.

Many of the leading photograph organisers neglect basic cataloguing and concentrate instead on editing functions, with the result that browsing your snaps becomes as fiddly as if you’d stuffed them into an old sideboard.

Here’s how the leading players stack up...

Adobe Photoshop Elements (£78) is great for small-to-medium collections, using keywords and albums to categorise your pictures according to subject. The separate editing module is an excellent cut-down of Adobe’s full Photoshop program, but if you’re serious about photography you’ll start to notice its limitations. 7/10

Google Picasa (free) is a basic library that makes it easy to find and share your pictures online. Given that it’s targeted at casual users, I find its interface confusing, but it is free so it makes sense to try it out first. 5/10

Adobe Lightroom (£106) is the choice of many professionals and serious amateurs and is infinitely customisable. But you have to adjust your workflow to suit the software. In particular, you must get used to your tweaks not being saved until you have exported your edited pictures from the program. You’ll either fall in love with it, or be driven mad. 7/10

Corel AfterShot Pro (£80) tries to be another Adobe Lightroom and fails miserably. Quite the most cluttered interface I’ve seen. 4/10

Cyberlink Photo Director (£80) is another Lightroom clone and a pretty good one, retaining most of the functionality and simplifying the workflow. This would be my choice program, but for the fact that it crashed repeatedly while navigating my large library. Download the free 30-day trial before committing money to the full version. 7/10

Many digital cameras come with free, cut-down versions of these or similar programmes so be sure to check before spending money.