Desktop photo organizer to create "Albums" without moving/copying files

Question

I am looking for a desktop photo organizer that provides the following two functions:

• Create "Albums" (collection of images) without moving or copying the files. The general idea is that one image may appear in multiple "Albums" without being copied into an Album folder. (e.g. something integrated in a photo organizer that works like GNU/Linux symbolic links.)

• Batch upload of an entire "Album" to a social website (e.g. Flickr, Facebook).

Google's Picasa has both features, but is awkward to use outside of the G+ ecosystem. I am looking for an alternative that works equally well with most social and photo sharing websites.

Answer 1

I would recommend Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

It is an excellent piece of software for managing photos. It's not free like Picasa but it's certainly not expensive for what you get. I've been using it since version 1 and just love how easy it is to manage your albums/collections, batch editing, printing and sharing to social media.

With the publishing tools, Facebook for example, it will keep track of which photos you have published. So if you edit a photo after publishing it you can easily re-publish it.

You can see an overview of publishing to Facebook here at about the 10 minute mark.

Answer 2

You can use Windows Photo Gallery. It is included as standard with some versions of Windows, or available to download free of charge as part of Windows Essentials. The latest version is Windows Photo Gallery 2012.

To group photos together, you can add tags. You can then get an album for that tag. Or view albums by date or folder.

It supports publishing photos to several web services, including batch upload of sets. As standard, this includes Flickr, Facebook and OneDrive. Plus there are plugins to add other services, eg Picasa or Gallery. Note publishing photos does require a Microsoft account, so you will have to sign up for that (free). You then link that account to other services.