Your Digital Archive

Zoner Photo Studio is a tremendous help whenever you need to organize and archive your pictures. Start by adding descriptions, keywords, and if you wish, audio notes to your pictures. You can leave pictures on your hard drive and organize them, and/or archive them to CD/DVD.

Keywords: Once And for All

Unlike single-purpose databases, Zoner Photo Studio uses the EXIF standard to store descriptions and keywords directly into images. This is the only way you can be sure that the time you devote
to entering keywords is not wasted the moment your needs outgrow your picture-database program.

Keep Your Keywords Organized

When you have an extensive archive, you need well-managed and well-structured keywords. In Zoner Photo Studio, you can meet both of these needs easily, with keywords organized into categories. You can regroup both categories and individual keywords as needed, thus changing the structure of your “keywords tree” to fit your needs. Zoner Photo Studio offers you an extremely simple way to assign keywords to one or more photographs: just drag them and drop them.

Archival Functions for Removable Media

Zoner Photo Studio helps you manage external media via its Media Archive, which lets you easily get a handle on even tens of thousands of photos archived on hundred of CDs or DVDs. Zoner Photo Studio first goes through any media you choose to index and stores information about photos—a thumbnail, a preview, and metadata—into a local archival database. You can browse through the data in the database the same as you do folders in Windows and search in them using one or more criteria, all this without needing to have the CDs, etc. in question actually present on your computer. If you want to open a picture at full quality but it’s currently offline, Zoner Photo Studio will ask you to insert the right CD or DVD. The database file is a standard type and thus can be accessed outside of Zoner Photo Studio - even in MS Access.

Albums Accessible by All Applications

There’s another major tool in Zoner Photo Studio for organizing your photos; it’s called albums. Zoner Photo Studio’s albums are simply traditional Windows folders with shortcuts to selected images that help you easily navigate by image type. Other programs create albums with their own special file structures, and users often end up regretting this fact when they want to use their images in another program or abandon an obsolete image manager. One example of how you might make use of the Albums feature is putting together a slideshow based on a large photo collection without having to make new copies of the files to use in the slideshow. Just like albums, the Search Results folder and CD compilation folder also make use of shortcuts. Meanwhile, all of these shortcuts can easily be converted to “real” files using a special function in Zoner Photo Studio.

There are several special kinds of albums: Search Results (see the next paragraph), CD compilations and Web albums.

Practical Searching And Filtering

In any well-organized photo collection, you can quickly and easily find photographs using Zoner Photo Studio’s searching and filtering functions. You can use EXIF metadata fields for searching—e.g. a photo’s description, author, keywords, or photo information (shutter speed, exposure time, etc.). A Search Results folder is created after every search; these are similar to Albums. You can also filter the display by the same criteria as are available for sorting. You can even search by photos’ similarity, which compares photos based on how similar their histograms are.