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Are any of these file management program's worth bothering with?
I have an image library with just over 9000 files, could do with a more efficient way of fishing out relevant files from multiple locations.
To be honest I don't know much about these program's. But the image library is only going to continue expanding, and I'm incredibly lazy so a labour saving solution would be handy.
What are the pros and cons, how do the freebies stack up against paid versions?
I just use Picasa + Google Plus. Assuming you're Ok with Google knowing even more about your private life it's pretty good.
This is for business purposes. That coupled with poor broadband I'd rather keep everything in house working from the server.
It's been a while since I used Picasa but one of its strengths was being able to monitor multiple file locations for photos and automatically bring them in Picasa itself.
I like iPhoto, but I don't earn a living with it.
Most of the open source/free options are pretty good these days, something like F-Spot worth a try?
F-spot is for gnomes unfortunately
Will have a mooch around picasa
I like iPhoto
iPhoto is on its deathbed. Apple will be pulling the plug next year sometime and replacing with their cross-platform Photos app.
Shotwell was the other one I was thinking of, but I think that might be linux gnome WM only too.
Have you tried the Windows Live Gallery (if its Windows)? Might be rubbish but it's free rubbish at least!
Photos is coming next year, post Yosemite. With the death of Aperture too, my bet is it's just a storage/meta data rationalisation and all the features I want will still be there, ut maybe not the OPs.
Lightroom or Darktable?
Didn't ask, but what do you actually want to do with the files? Tag them? Build albums? If it's renaming them to something like YYYYMMDD-DSC10001.png or similar you could just write a command line script. Similarly parsing EXIF data is fairly simple if you know a bit of programming.