I an just about to upgrade the home PC, its to be used for photos banking and general non tablet tasks.

We have been using an ancient old Kodak easyshare software (yes yes I know!) so want to get something better. It does need to be fairly user friendly as the missus will be using it mainly and is a bit of a technophobe! we will be on Windows 7

Ta all

capture one.
i have no interest in organising/maintaining a library or keyboarding though.
most use Lightroom or capture one. capture one has the best processing engine for colour and detail though. camera raw (as used by photoshop and lightroom isn’t always the best)

Lightroom is *epic* and worth the investment if you’re vaguely serious about photos. If you want something easier for a technophone then I can’t help but endorse getting a Mac instead and using the pre-installed Photos app…

Windows Photo Gallery. It may be preinstalled, depending on what Windows version you are using, or you can download it for free. It is pretty easy to use. It can do all of the usual tagging stuff, plus people tagging, with face detection.

Capture One
Interested to know how you find it. I’m still using Aperture at the moment as I can’t get along with LR.
Have read some great reviews of Capture. I know its supposed to be ok for organising your images, is it good as an editing tool?

Good points all thanks, I use a mac at work so I like them but she is very PC based! Hadn’t considered Windows gallery, I think I have an old copy of lightroom somewhere too……

Have read some great reviews of Capture. I know its supposed to be ok for organising your images, is it good as an editing tool?

It was pretty much the reverse until recently when they launched version nine and now has a pretty good organisation capability incorporated into that let’s you use key words, smart albums, etc.

The editing engine is brilliant. You can probably get the same results from Lightroom with the same file but when I tried them both extensively back to back, Capture One seemed to have a bit more depth and be quicker to get you the finished result.

It’s worth bearing in mind that there will be a far bigger tutorial resource for LR (everywhere you look really, but Ming Thein has a very extensive and easy to follow tutorial) but Capture One has it’s own in house video tutorial library and they run online seminars that are really good (I attended one the other week and learned a ton of new stuff).

Picasa’s a half-decent free option. Lightroom is the de facto answer though.

Lightroom

Get a mac.