Fotoalbum 2009-02-12

fotoalbum can be used to quickly view, organize, describe, tag, rotate, edit pictures and related files. It contains advanced features to search and find pictures, too.
Big collections can be handled easily (mine has grown to about 9000 pictures now).
You can export single pictures or groups of them with various options (with/without thumbnails, html indexpages, original size/shrinked, set IPTC/XMP metadata, ...).

Why use it? What is so special about it?

There are some special concepts behind fotoalbum which lead to some advantages. But there is a reason ordinary Joe User might not like this application:

* To benefit from using it, Joe User needs to understand some concepts like files, directories, symbolic links (like they exist on unix filesystems) and less simple things described below. This might not be a problem, but have you ever tried to make your parents (age 50+, little or no computer experience before) use a computer and tried to tell them about files and directories?

There is a step-by-step example included in the help which explains the basic concepts and shows how to use this application.
Additional information may be stored in the picture files, but it is not mandatory

Once you have rotated and maybe edited the picture (red eyes, brightness, contrast, ...) the file is left untouched. So if you change the pictures comment, date/time or keywords afterwards (metadata is read from picture file initially) the original file is still the same. There is no need to backup this file (which usually is big in terms of disk space) again.
So this is an advantage if you care about backups. You really should care about backups if you like your pictures.
Furthermore, there are some file formats which are not able to contain additional data (comments and keywords). Using such file formats is no problem with fotoalbum.
However, it is possible to write back your keywords and comment into the picture file using standard methods (IPTC, XMP).