Organizing photos

vs.

I spent a time this weekend playing around with and comparing two digital photo organization software titles: Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0 and Microsoft Digital Image Suite 10 (the library portion). I am sad to report that the Microsoft product seems to be better overall.They both have significant issues, and both are reputed to be improving these in their next versions, but from what I've seen so far the Microsoft product wins the race. The top three reasons MS DIS wins: Better performance working with large numbers of photos, keyword tagging is easier and more robust, and it handles "offline files" better (files it can't currently access over a network, etc). The things Adobe PSA does that MS DIS doesn't: Calendar view with "event" concept, supports PSD files, the ability to "hide" files in your collection without deleting them, and the inclusion of video and audio files in the library (MS DIS claims to include video but it doesn't say what file types and it doesn't work with mine). I have done brief experimentation with the Adobe PSA archiving functionality and read about it quite a bit in the online user forums. Their archiving functionality is pretty limited - you have to use Album to archive or it won't understand where your photos are - and I read online that there are a lot of bugs trying to archive large quantities of photos (>1 CD) at a time. Note that neither of these products currently supports the RAW image format for my camera (Nikon Coolpix 5400 NEF files), though I've heard this is being added in the next version of both products. Other solutions? If you're wondering if I considered other products the answer is: sort of. I looked at Extensis Portfolio online and it looked like the feature set was similar and it didn't support my RAW files either. Plus, it was $200 I didn't feel like spending. I didn't look further than that.