I have purchased my first digital camera, a Sony Cybershot 5.1 MP. With the camera came something called "Picture Package Viewer" and a trial free version of ACDSee, which can be purchased for about $50. ACDSee seems fairly easy to use, but I haven't given it much of a workout yet. Should I buy this or is there something better out there?

I can only parrot reviews; ACDSee is very well reviewed, but it is intended for serious photographers and neither the publisher nor the reviews say it is easy for novices.

I use Photoshop Album 1.0 and Photoshop Elements in combination (I think the functionality of Photoshop Album and Photoshop Elements has been combined into Photoshop Elements 3.0) as well as Picasa. Picasa has several advantages, not least of which is that it's free for download from picasa.com. You have to watch out for its tendency to make copies of your pictures without telling you - this is configurable, it can just take you by surprise, and is partly so that you can edit and always go back to the earlier version. The Picasa user interface is quite good.

I'd say try Picasa first, just because it's free and you can always throw it away if you don't like it. As with my experience with Photoshop Album, if you've paid for it and used it for a while, you have a resistance to replacing it.

Another good option is BreezeBrowserPro.

It's an excellent program, although its price has gone up in the last year. It's easy to use, manages and organizes pictures nicely, and will generate web pages for you (the pics in this thread were generated almost entirely by BreezeBrowser). Many pros/advanced amatuers use it as a front-end to PhotoShop.

Thanks for your suggestions. I'm weighing my options. I'm having a lot of fun with my camera and I can see that storing the photos is going to be one of those additional tasks I need to do to keep them where I can find them.

MarionP,

Note that these suggestions are for viewing, making slideshows, etc.

On how to actually store the images, as the title of this thread states, you need to look at other things.

If you don't take a huge number of photos, leaving them on your hard drive will be fine. Just make sure that you have some kind of a back scheme in place, or you will loose everything if you hard drive fails.

If you do take a lot of photos, then the answers are not so clear. CDs have a reputation of beginning to deteriorate after 6 months to a year. DVDs seem to be even worse.

For music, this is no problem because the changes are miniscule. But for images stored as JPGs, which is probably the most popular image format, it's another story. Because of the encoding scheme, a change of just one bit in the image may corrupt the whole image.

Storing images in a TIF format is much safer, but expect to see your image size to increase by a factor of 10 to 20.

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ACDSee

Skipped the ACDSee, unless you can say why you need it, then there is no reason to buy it. If you are using WindowsXP you can view the JPEG photo in the Windows Explorer.

Also your subject is misleading. You use ACDSee to view you photos, it not going to resolve you storage needs.

Bill