Photohoard — Keeping your digital photos together¶
If your photographic habits are at all like mine, you probably take [4] several thousand photos every year. You don’t have the time (or inclination) to organize them in a particular way, so they end up in the digital equivalent of a shoebox. Then, your child’s school needs a few family pictures for some project and you end up desparately searching through the folders. Very unpleasant, because even the thumbnails are slow to load when you have thousands of them to look at [5].
Photohoard for organization¶
Photohoard is primarily intended to ease this pain. It does not force you to spend any time organizing or tagging your photos (though you can), but simply presents them in a timeline. It also caches previews at various scales, so it is lightningly fast at scrolling through thousands of images.
Photohoard allows you to apply “color labels”, “status flags”, “star ratings,” and arbitrary “tags” to your images and even to organize them into “collections.” To be honest, I use the facilities minimally. Just having all my photos in a timeline is the most important thing.
Photohoard for nondestructive editing¶
In addition to organizing, Photohoard helps you develop your photos. It contains a fully nondestructive image editing pipeline with tools like:
Cropping and rotating
Perspective correction
Exposure and curve correction
White balance correction
Unsharp masking and local contrast enhancement
All of the curve and color tools operate in appropriate color spaces (mostly IPT [6]). Moreover, Photohoard is fully color-managed.
In practice, I usually apply edits to the entire image, although Photohoard does offer regional masks so edits can be restricted to particular areas.
Why use Photohoard?¶
Wondering if Photohoard is for you? Here is a comparison with some alternatives.
User guide¶
For more details on how to use the software, read these chapters.
License information¶
Photohoard is free software. Read what that means here: