IDimager

I've been an owner of a digital camera since 2003, and ever since then I've been looking for a good photo album software. The first one I had was Adobe PhotoShop Album, and I even upgraded to version 2, and later, the free V3 Starter edition. What I liked about it the most was the ability to edit an image, while automatically maintaining the original, and seeing only one version in the album (hence the name versioning). But it was slow, and the format was not compatible with anything else.

So, a year ago I've found IDimager, which has all of the qualities that I needed (including a good tagging system, and open architecture). The most important need was Versioning. True it doesn't automatically back up the picture you're editing, but you can easily "Save As" the picture, and you'll see only the edited version in the album. It also made it possible to create versions to my old pictures, which were edited with the Adobe software (although I've yet to catalog all of the pictures from that time), and it has a decent Web Album capabilities for those of you with a web site (there are other publishing methods as well).

Version 4 came out recently, with a very important change. Instead of the Access DB at the back-end (for the Personal version), the back-end is now SQLite, which is a lot more quicker and stable.

If you're looking for a similar product, I highly recommend to check this out.