The good news about digital cameras is the ability to quickly create Many photos inexpensively. The bad news is that they have to be stored in a way that you can find them. Cumulus is an excellent tool for this.

Canto Cumulus is billed as a professional's tool, which told me that it has abilities beyond my needs. I find this attractive as the reverse can be so frustrating. This is not a program that I, as an enthusiast (not a professional) am likely to grow out of.

I stick to a fairly basic set of functions, most especially the ability to quickly categorize my photos.

The mechanism is simplicity itself. First, you tell the program to create a catalog from the contents of folder(s) of photo files. The result is a visual representation of the folders and thumbnails of the photos. All normal file types are supported, JPG, GIF, BMP etc etc etc and of course Photoshop.

Then you create extra "folders" and folders within folders. These are really "category names". For example, you might create a "Places" folder, containing various "country" folders, each of which contains various state, city, town or other location folders. Drag and drop individual or groups of files into these, NOT to duplicate the files, but to add categories to the records of the files. You might also create a "people" folder, which has subfolders such as family names and then down to individuals.

Searching for that photo of Auntie Maud taken in Berlin is then a snap.

I also like the ability to create a slide show of a collection of photos. You can even annotate each photo with a an audio clip (you need a microphone of course), and, optionally, the slide show will play back the audio. This slide show is actually a MOV (QuickTime) file.

The downside is that this tool, being intended for the professional, has a significant learning curve to master the advanced stuff, and some functions are not really implemented in an obvious manner. Expect to have to read the excellent documentation to get the best out of it.

I got my copy last December (2000) when they had a half-price Christmas special. Today, I have over 8,000 photo files managed by Cumulus, and it is not showing any signs of effort. I think it has limits well over 100,000 photos.

Recommended: Yes