10 Best Photo Management Software to Help You Organize Images

Are you having trouble organizing all your photos? Photo management software is a tool you can utilize to categorize your ever growing photo library, with its built in sorting method and filtering capabilities you are to access your photos with ease and most importantly stop making your computer a total mess!

Today in this article, we are going to introduce all the best photo management softwares for Windows, Mac and Linux, including their management features, pricing, reviews and comparison! Here we go!

What is photo management software?

Photo management software is a kind of utility software that users use to organize and browse digital images. It is also called photo organizer, image organizer or image management software.

How to choose photo management software?

How to evaluate or even choose a good photo organizing software? First thing is to check whether the photo management software suits your operating systems and if the software support your image formats, then for managing photo capabilities these are some features you need to consider:

• Rename image files
• Identify duplicates
• Organize photos by one or more categories— tags, folders, albums, smart collections, grouping, stacking
• Sort photos according to different metadata or criteria— type, date, size, color, rating, dimension
• Advanced searching method, such as "keywords contains coffee", "date before 2021", "not png"
• Simple photo editing capabilities— combine images, crop, duplicate, resize
• Preview photos in different layouts or slideshows
• Retention original Exif, IPTC and XMP metadata
• Exporting metadata associated with photos or in different formats and dimension
• Backing up options with clouds

Don't you worry if you don't know which features to choose from, we have made this article super easy for you to read and understand, if you still don't have any clue, read the photo management software comparison section below!

Best Photo Management Software to Help You Organize Photos

Having a lot of images is definitely a great thing. But when you have thousands of photos, the organization becomes a pain. It's impractical to remember all images names. Let’s look at the best photo management software to help you make photo organization simple and easier!

1. Eagle App

Eagle is a digital assets management tool made for designers. It is famous for its ability to organize and manage all your design files, including photo management!

You can sort images with many different ways like tags, ratings, folders and smart folders which is really helpful in categorizing/finding hundreds of photos without making a mess on your PC. You can also preview photos in many ways, like justify, waterfall, grid and more!

If you are a person that possesses more than just image files, such as 3d files, mp4, GIF, PSD files or more, you might find a happy place in Eagle!

Key Features of Eagle App:

• Powerful Organizing options such as Tags, Rating, Comments and more
• Smart Folder can help you automatically find and organize photos
• Instant preview 81+ design formats: images, psd, ai, pdf, fonts, svg, gif, 3D. It even support formats like figma, C4D, videos, mindnode and xmind.
• Advance filter options: colors, shapes, size, dimensions, tags, ratings, annotations
• Export photos into JPG, PNG, BMP, WebP formats
• Beautiful and Customizable interface

Operating system: macOS and Windows

Supported image type 

• Image: bmp, eps, gif, heic, icns, ico, jpeg, jpg, png, svg, tif, tiff, ttf, webp, base64,
• Video and audio: m4v, mp4, webm, mpg, mov, aac, flac, m4a, mp3, ogg, wav
• RAW: 3fr, arw, cr2, cr3, crw, dng, erf, mrw, nef, nrw, orf, otf, pef, raf, raw, rw2, sr2, srw, x3f

and other graphic design application formats.

Pricing: Free Trial 30 days, One-time purchase with free updates: US$29.95 (One license for two devices)

Website: https://en.eagle.cool/

2. Adobe Bridge

Adobe Bridge is a design asset management tool and is a part of the Creative Cloud ecosystem. If you're working exclusively with other Adobe products, Bridge is the gem design resources organizer for you, it provides sorting, search, ratings, tagging, and even built-in photo editing capabilities.

One of the things you have to look out for is as your photo library grows, its file importing and processing speed might gonna take a while for it to run.

Key Features of Adobe Bridge:

• Managing bulk workflows
• Export images in multiple formats
• Edit assets by opening them right inside Creative Cloud apps
• Organizing assets with labels, ratings, metadata, and keywords
• Use advanced filters, collections, and search to find the assets you’re looking for
• Visualize all your PS, Ai, AE, InDesign, and 3D files with thumbnails and rich previews

Supported image type: adobe file types

Operating system: Windows and macOS

Pricing: Free if you have Adobe Creative Cloud Account

Website: https://www.adobe.com/products/bridge.html

Read more: Looking for Adobe Bridge Replacement? Explore alternative tool

3. ACDSee Photo Studio

ACDSee Photo Studio is a great image management software tools for extensive RAW files, as it offers RAW support for more than 550 digital camera models. The tool allows you to organize your images by adding ratings, hierarchical keywords, tags, categories, location data and customizable color labels and using face recognition and data location features, making it easier to search for the images you need.

Key Features of ACDSee Photo Studio:

• Facial Recognition & Face Detection
• Image location detecting
• Batch images renaming and resizing
• Add ratings, hierarchical keywords, tags, categories, and customizable color labels
• Photo Editing Tools

Supported image type:

• Image: ABR, ACDC, AFPHOTO, ANI, ARW, BMP, CNV, CR2, CR3, cRAW, CRW, CUR, CVX, DCR, DCX, DNG, EMF, ERF, GIF, GPR, GSD, HDR, HEIF, ICN, ICO, JBR, JPG, MRW, NEF, ORF, PBR, PCX, PEF, PCT, PNG, PSD, RAF, RAW, RWL, sRAW, SRW, SVG, TGA, TIFF, WBMP, WEBP, WMF
• Audio and Video: AAC, ADRS, ASF, AVI, M4A, M4V, MOV, MP3, MP4, WAV, WMA, WMV

Operating system: Windows, macOS, iOS, Android

Pricing: Free Trial 30 days

• Subscription: US$8.90 / month or US$89 / year, 100GB Cloud Storage Included
• Life time license: US$69.95 one time fee

Website: https://www.acdsee.com/en/products/photo-studio-ultimate/

4. digiKam

DigiKam is an open-source image organizer and tag editor. It is the most powerful photo management software that supports Linux. It not only supports various common image formats and RAW formats, but it also allows to view photo collections by face recognition, date, time, rating or tags.

In addition, digiKam offers various image editing tools such as red-eye removal, color management, image filters or special effects editing options.

Key Features of digiKam:

• Export albums to online platform easily
• Organize collections of photographs in directory-based albums, date, timeline, or tags
• Add captions and ratings
• Face recognition
• Image enhancement tools for red-eye removal, color management, image filters

Supported image type:

• Images: JPEG, PNG, TIFF, PGF

• RAW: CRW, CR2, NEF, ORF, RAF, RWL, PEF, PTX, X3F, DCR, KDC, DC2, K25, SRF, ARW, MRW, MDC, DNG, CS1, HDR, BAY, ERF, FFF, MOS, PXN, RDC

Pricing: Free

Operating system: Windows, Mac, Linux

Website: https://www.digikam.org/

5. XnViewer MP

XnView MP is a free photo management software for personal and educational usage. It is also one of the photo management software that supports linux, it allows allows you to process your images with different viewing options and editing tools.

You can animate, rename, convert, and add stunning effects to your images, such as coloring or captioning.

Key Features of XnViewer MP:

• Photo Editor: Resize, Rotate, Adjust Brightness, Contrast
• Photo Viewer: Thumbnail, FullScreen, FilmStrip View, SlideShow with FX, Image Compare
• Batch Conversion

Supported image type: all major image formats (JPEG, TIFF, PNG, GIF, WEBP, PSD, JPEG2000, OpenEXR, camera RAW, HEIC, PDF, DNG, CR2)

Pricing: 

• Free for educational and personal usage
• For Company usage 29.00 €/ per license

Operating system: Windows, Mac, Linux

Website: https://www.xnview.com/en/xnviewmp/

6. Lightroom

If you are adobe user you must heard of Lightroom, Lightroom’s main feature is raw photo editing, ability to process large number of photos at once and metadata management. It can also be a simple software to organize your photos to give your images tags and sorting options.

Many users like to integrates Adobe Bridges wide range of organize ability with Lightroom’s editing features to maximize the experience in photo management and editing potentials.

Key Features of Lightroom:

• Powerful image editing abilities
• Raw photo processing
• Easily share photo to different platforms
• Batch editing
• Facial recognition

Supported image type: Most camera raw formats, DNG, HEIF/HEIC, TIFF, JPEG, PSD, CMYK files, PNG

Pricing: US$9.99/monthly

Operating system: Windows, Mac, iOS

Website: https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop-lightroom.html

7. Pixave

If you are looking for an image organizer on mac, then Pixave is a great choice for you!

Pixave offers many features, one of which is an AI image tagger. Many tags can be applied immediately to a number of images and can be searched for along with their tags. For tagging, simply drag the tag to an image or vice versa.

However, if you need further support, bug report or feature request unfortunately you will get very little support from their team but for the feature it offers and the pricing it is still one of the product that is very useful and competitive on the photo management software market.

Key Features of Pixave:

• Export with tags
• Batch image tagging
• Automatic keyword import
• Adding and searching for tags
• Drag a tag to quickly put in images

Supported image type: GIF, JPEG, JPEG 2000, PNG, TIFF, ICNS, AI, PSD, EPS (included PDF info only), PDF, TGA, SVG, BMP, ICO, Camera RAW, HEIC, HEIF, and others

Pricing: Free

Operating system: macOS, iPad, and Web browser extension for Chrome.

Website: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pixave/id924891282

8. darktable

darktable is an open source photography workflow application and raw developer. A virtual lighttable and darkroom for photographers. It manages your digital negatives in a database, lets you view them and enhance them.

You can search your image collections by tags, image rating (stars), color labels and many more, use flexible database queries on all metadata of your images. You can also adjust image details such as exposure, hue, resolutions.

Key Features of darktable:

• Color management
• Filtering and sorting with varies metadata
• Map mode
• Raw photo processing

Supported image type: JPEG, CR2, NEF, HDR, RAF, JPEG, PNG, PPM, TIFF, PFM, EXR images.

Pricing: Free

Operating system: Linux, MacOS, BSD, Windows and GNOME.

Website: https://www.darktable.org/

9. Google Photos

Google Photos is a free and renowned image management software that's great for small businesses and beginners. With Google Photos, you can backup and access photos or any other image references through different devices.

It allows you to search by object and keywords to find image files, and it also has an auto-tagging feature for faces so that you can even organize photo albums by the individual.

Key Features of Google Photos:

• easy-to-use
• Search by tags (faces)
• Auto-tagging for faces
• Automatically identify objects in images and the location where the picture was taken

Supported image type:

• Images: BMP, GIF, HEIC, ICO, JPG, PNG, TIFF, WEBP, some RAW files.
• Videos: 3GP, 3G2, ASF, AVI, DIVX, M2T, M2TS, M4V, MKV, MMV, MOD, MOV, MP4, MPG, MTS, TOD, WMV.

Pricing: Free

Operating system: Android, iOS, Web

Website: https://www.google.com/photos/about/

10. Canto

Canto is one of the most experienced digital assets management software in the market, if you are a large company user that need to do photo management, Canto is especially suitable for big team sizes who work between different departments or clients.

It has the ability to store and access data and information, give permissions and restrict to certain users. Very easy to share links with third party users.

Key Features of Canto:

• Version Control
• Asset Sharing, Access control
• Asset Categorization: tags, folders rating and more

Supported image type: most images, videos and adobe file formats

Pricing: quote-based plan upon request and has a 15-day free trial.

Operating system: Cloud, SaaS, Web-Based, macOS & Windows, ios

Website: https://www.canto.com/

Best Photo Management Software Comparison 

Features/ Brand	Eagle	Adobe Bridge	ACDSee Photo Studio	digiKam	XnViewer MP	Adobe Lightroom	Pixave	darktable	Google Photos	Canto
Preview RAW	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	❌	✅
Tags	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	❌	✅
Rating	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	❌	✅	❌	✅
Annotation	✅	❌	❌	❌	✅	❌	❌	❌	✅	✅
Bulk processing	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	❌	❌	✅
Find Duplicate	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	❌	❌	✅
Export to different formats	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	❌	❌
Platform	macOS, Windows	macOS, Windows	Windows, macOS, iOS, Android	Windows, Mac, Linux	Windows, Mac, Linux	Windows, Mac, iOS	macOS, iPad, and Web browser extension for Chrome	Linux, MacOS, BSD, Windows and GNOME	Android, iOS, Web	Cloud, SaaS, Web-Based, macOS & Windows, ios
Pricing	One time payment US$29.95 for 2 devices, free lifetime updates	Free if you have Adobe Creative Cloud Account	Subscription: US$8.90 /month or US$89 / year with 100GB Cloud Storage Lifetime license: US$69.95 one time fee	Free	Free: for educational and personal usage For Company usage: €29/ per license	US$9.99/month	Free	Free	Free	quote-based plan upon request
Trial	30 days	Free version	30 days	Free	Free	7 days	Free	Free	Free	15 days
Support Formats	Image: bmp, eps, gif, heic, icns, ico, jpeg, jpg, png, svg, tif, tiff, ttf, webp, base64 RAW: 3fr, arw, cr2, cr3, crw, dng, erf, mrw, nef, nrw, orf, otf, pef, raf, raw, rw2, sr2, srw, x3f Video and audio: m4v, mp4, webm, mpg, mov, aac, flac, m4a, mp3, ogg, wav Others: font, office, 3D and other graphic design software formats	adobe file types	Image: abr, acdc, afphoto, ani, arw, bmp, cnv, cr2, cr3, craw, crw, cur, cvx, dcr, dcx, dng, emf, erf, gif, gpr, gsd, hdr, heif, icn, ico, jbr, jpg, mrw, nef, orf, pbr, pcx, pef, pct, png, psd, raf, raw, rwl, sraw, srw, svg, tga, tiff, wbmp, webp, wmf Audio and Video: aac, adrs, asf, avi, m4a, m4v, mov, mp3, mp4, wav, wma, wmv	Image: jpeg, png, tiff, pgf RAW: crw, cr2, nef, orf, raf, rwl, pef, ptx, x3f, dcr, kdc, dc2, k25, srf, arw, mrw, mdc, dng, cs1, hdr, bay, erf, fff, mos, pxn, rdc	all major image formats (jpeg, tiff, png, gif, webp, psd, jpeg2000, openexr, camera raw, heic, pdf, dng, cr2)	Most camera raw formats, dng, heif, heic, tiff, jpeg, psd, cmyk files, png	gif, jpeg, jpeg 2000, png, tiff, icns, ai, psd, eps, pdf, tga, svg, bmp, ico, Camera raw, heic, heif	jpeg, cr2, nef, hdr, raf, jpeg, png, ppm, tiff, pfm, exr	Images: bmp, gif, heic, ico, jpg, png, tiff, webp, some RAW files Videos: 3gp, 3g2, asf, avi, divx, m2t, m2ts, m4v, mkv, mmv, mod, mov, mp4, mpg, mts, tod, wmv	Images: jpg, jpeg, png, eps, tif, tiff RAW: orf, nef, cr2, psd, indd Videos and Audios: mov, mp4, flv, 3gp, mpg, flac, wav, m4a, mp3 Others: office and 3d files

Made by Eagle Team

Photo Management Software FAQ

What’s the best photo management software for PC and Mac?

The best photo management software for PC is Eagle App, it has a beautiful interface and many organization abilities, fulfill the ability to manage all your photos and integrates with your favorite photo editing software or graphic design softwares.

Whats the best photo management software for open-source?

Digikam and XnViewer MP are both great for open source photo management, they can both edit photos, organize and manage a wide range of image formats.

What is image format?

A image format is a specific file type(s) designated to hold digital image data, Image files are composed of digital data in one of these formats so that the data can be rasterized for use on a computer display or printer.

Why photo management software is important?

You might be wondering why do we need photo management software when we already have an operating system to organize our photos?

That is because photo management software generally provides more photo management capabilities than our operating systems such as cataloging, inspecting and editing photos.

Some photo management software even offers the ability to organize photos in different folders to help you reduce the storage space and load on the system in order to keep many photos active at the same time.

Where to find free images to download?

Looking for free images to download them into your photo management software? We have curated amazing websites to download free images including complete usage guide!

46 Best Free and Royalty-free image websites

43 Best Websites Designers Love for Finding Design inspirations

36+ Amazing Photography Websites for Designers

Or you can visit Eagle Community, where there are many designers who shares free design reference, ui design, icons, tools for your to explore for your next creative project!

What is Eagle Community?

What to look for in Photo Management software?

I believe the above-mentioned software allows you to organize and manage your images, but they can't do it all for you. You still have to, at the very least, save and organize photos yourself. If you still don't know where to start, just ask yourself:

• What kind of device do you work on the most?
• What is your budget? Do you need a lot of storage spaces?
• On-premises or cloud-based photo management?
• Is it able to sync font database between different devices?
• What kind of feature is the most important to you? do you need team sharing abilities or simply personal usage is enough?
• What is their customer support like? You don’t want to pay for a product but be left alone right, make sure you check out if they have consistent with their support channel.

I believe with these questions you already have a clear answer! Utilize the free trial or free version and see if it suits you, eventually, you will know what you need!