PhotoMesa is a program that lets you browse, annotate and search your digital images. Its goal is to support you in managing your photos close to the way you already are likely to be organizing them. Our research shows that most people put groups of photos from their digital cameras in folders which they name. Sometimes people group those folders by year or other "super groups", but otherwise do little more to organize their photos, and rarely rename individual photo files. Others use software from camera manufacturers that automatically downloads photos and puts the photos in a new folder for each day.
PhotoMesa supports these styles of use by letting you easily access photos from the folder structure you have already created. Most importantly, you can keep on using your existing folder structure. In fact, you are free to look at photos within or outside of PhotoMesa - it never forces you to import your photos into some proprietary internal database. PhotoMesa then lets you look at your photos with a novel zoomable user interface. Learn more about browsing photos.
Later on, you may find yourself having thousands or even tens of thousands of photos, and even careful hierarchical filing isn't enough to easily find photos you are looking for - especially if you are trying to find interesting groups of people - say all those photos with your friend and his daughter over the past 10 years. So, you may decide to slowly start adding annotations to your photos - either unformatted captions, or the names of people or objects in the photos - which you can then search on later. Learn more about annotating or searching for photos.
PhotoMesa also supports this more advanced mechanism for organizing photos - annotating them for future searching. It turns out that annotation can be quite a bit of fun as you write a small story describing the photo in the caption field - or call your grandparent to ask them who someone was in an old picture.
It is important to know that we understand that you own your data - not us. So, all your annotations are stored in human-readable standard formats. You'll never be locked into our software just because you decide to use it now. Even better, your annotations are stored with the individual photos that are annotated. So, if you annotate a photo and send that to a friend and they open it in PhotoMesa, they'll immediately see the same annotations that you made. Read more about how PhotoMesa stores its data.
Finally, if you've been using PhotoMesa for a while, you can read more about shortcuts and other tips & tricks.