Picture Perfect: Best Apps for Importing and Organizing Your Images

“A picture is worth a thousand words”. But finding the photograph on your five gigabyte memory card is the challenge. Trying to locate that one money shot by shifting through hundreds of photos with file names can be daunting and downright annoying. There are several mobile apps that address this, whether you're a professional photographer or weekend shutterbug. Most of the default importing programs that come with operating systems, such as Windows Import and Mac Image Capture, lack any sort of workflow, which is where these apps come in.

Woven

A great app produced by a small company, Woven can bring together all your photos that are spread across various social platforms. It easily imports photos from Facebook, Photobucket, Instagram, and Skydrive. Litl.com, the company behind Woven, said it wanted to create an app that allows users to view all of their photos in an orderly fashion no matter where they are stored. Photos are organized in threads and the software incorporates facial-recognition technology to make locating specific pictures easier. The most recent version of the app also allows users to view photos on a Samsung Smart TV. The app is free and available for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone.

Google Picasa

This free app has remained one of the most popular on the market due to its streamlined interface and multiple dimensions. Picasa photo editing features are easy-to-use, yet give results that make a novice user look like they attended photography school. There's an auto-fix option, along with red-eye correction, simple cropping, and fill light features. Importing is simple, especially bringing in raw files from your camera without installing any additional codec. The one glaring negative about Picasa is the lack of a direct way to upload photos to Flickr or Facebook without a third-party plug-in. Still, Picasa is the most complete free app on the market.

Everpix

Created by 33cube, Inc., Everpix automatically uploads all your iPhone photos and arranges them in the order they were snapped. Everpix uses a feature called “assistive curating” to create attractively laid-out album groupings. It has a built-in feature to upload photos directly to Facebook, and automatically sync photos in Instagram, Picasa, and Flickr.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4

If you're serious about photography and have a few extra dollars to spend, Lightroom 4 is for you. The import feature allows users to see thumbnail and full-sized images before importing them from the device. The interface is as simple as they get. Develop mode has sliders right on the screen to adjust contrast and brightness, and a Library mode, which has a spray-can feature that lets you add metadata to any photo. Survey mode allows comparison of several photos at once from a larger view.