Aspect

Our mobile phones and cameras gather photos that capture precious memories and important moments in our lives. Hundreds of photos end up on our computer afterwards, and managing them efficiently becomes a challenge. Fortunately, there are dedicated applications that provide quick and simple means of categorizing digital photos, providing handy image management tools designed to make our task easier. Aspect is one of them, and a bit about its capabilities and its limitations is detailed in the following.

Designed for photographers, Aspect is a photo cataloging tool that aims to help you keep your entire collection of images neatly organized. But why choose it over other similar tools, you might ask? Well, its approach is a bit different and goes beyond the classical star ratings and color labels that mark photos in a personal library.

You start by populating the photo stream in Aspect with your images. In other words, Aspect allows you to import photos and populate your personal library, with or without preserving the files in their source location. For your convenience, Aspect features duplicate management and automatic importing, meaning newly added photos in a given location can be instantly added to the Aspect library. This comes in handy when working with shared network folders, in particular.

The photo stream in Aspect includes a thumbnail preview of all the imported images, which can be easily organized using color labels, star ratings, keywords and other such instruments. The best thing about Aspect is that it can help you create coherent photo sets that allow you to work with tags, labels, ratings and folder hierarchies at the same time. It creates simple or taxonomy collections, groups and events, all to quickly locate and manage photos.

Speaking about events, you might want to know a bit more about this feature. You can create so-called events in Aspect that allow you to store photos taken, for instance, during a holiday or a photo shoot separately in a folder, but inside the main library. Photos in an event folder can also be stored in any number of collections and tagged, rated or categorized.

Aiming to make a transparent and adaptable organizational model, Aspect translates the way photos are organized inside its library to the file system on your computer. The changes you make to the file system are mirrored inside Aspect’s library as well.

It is worth mentioning that Aspect provides support for multiple devices and comes with support for peer-to-peer synchronization to allow quick access to your photo library.

Working with Aspect is pretty intuitive once you understand its concepts. Managing photos and placing them in different collections is simple. There are multiple sorting modes, a duplicate finder, a metadata editor and built-in search tools.

The software is still in the early stages of development, but it shows promise. Keep in mind that, although the developers do not mention any particular requirements, the application might experience lags on older systems.