fotoARRAY grew out of our own needs, and most of its functions have a story. Here are the situations it was made for.
A family collection of forty years is a mix of scans, camera JPEG files, RAW files and phone pictures on several drives. Nobody will ever sort all of it, and nobody should have to. Import everything into one catalog, let the timeline and the folders do the first sorting, mark the important pictures with a star while you browse, and give the persons and places keywords when you meet them. The catalog stays useful even if the work is never finished, because browsing it is fast and the previews are in HD.
When the time comes to hand it over, the Free Edition is what the next generation needs: a small program that runs without an account, and a catalog file. With PRO you can export an album as a stand alone catalog, so every child gets their own selection with the pictures inside, and the Free Edition shows such a catalog without its limit of 100 pictures per view. FREE
Put the pictures of the vacation into an album, enable manual order and arrange them. Switch the grid to the page layout of your book format, correct the crops on the tiles, straighten the horizons. Export the editable PDF and upload it to the book service, or export JPEG pages when the service wants pictures. The whole book takes an evening, most of which you spend choosing. PRO for the editable PDF and the JPEG pages, FREE for the flattened PDF with footer.
The originals of the last ten years are on an external drive that is connected once a month. The catalog with the HD previews is on the SSD of the notebook. You browse, rate, keyword and even build a book layout without the drive. The export at the end tells you which originals it needs, you connect the drive, and it runs. Pictures whose original is missing are one filter away. FREE
You shoot RAW and develop the important pictures in Capture One or DxO PhotoLab, but you do not want to import 200,000 pictures into those programs. Select the shooting in fotoARRAY with the flags, put the keepers into an album and export the album with sidecars into a project folder. Develop there. fotoARRAY copies the sidecars and the finished JPEG files back, and the catalog shows your results from then on. PRO
Friends visit and want to see the pictures of the trip. Select them, press share, and show the QR code. Everybody in your Wi-Fi sees the pictures in their browser and can download the ones they like. No app, no upload to a service, and the share expires when you say so. PRO
A box of prints was scanned in a hurry, several prints per scan, crooked and with white borders. Import the scans, select them and run the automatic crop: fotoARRAY finds the frames and the borders and sets the crop on every tile. Straighten the few it got wrong on the tile, give them a date with the date tool, and the box is a folder of usable pictures. PRO for the automatic crop, FREE for crop, straighten and date by hand.
You remember a red boat, a summer evening, maybe 2019 or 2020. Select the two years in the timeline, sort by dominant colour and scroll to the red pictures. Or take a picture that looks similar and ask for the pictures that resemble it. Or type "boat" if you gave it a keyword back then. The point is that each of these takes seconds, so you try several. FREE
After every shooting the card goes into the reader, the card copy tool copies the new pictures into a folder named by date and camera, moves the sidecars along, and imports the folder into the catalog. The profile remembers everything, the only decision left is the name of the event. BONUS in every edition.