My digital photo library recently hit the 30,000 mark, and as it has grown, I’ve been on a continuous quest to find a tool that can handle the volume.

I started with home-grown tools, then switched to the Organizer tool in PhotoShop Elements. As my library grew, Elements got flaky (hangs, frequent resets of the thumbnail cache).

Then, I tried Adobe Lightroom (30-day free trial, for Mac and Windows).  It’s not cheap ($300), but it’s awesome.

It’s designed for the professional workflow:  sorting through a large batch of photos, marking candidates, doing basic fixup, then burn/print/publish.   The editing functions are not as powerful as PhotoShop’s, but they’re more intuitively presented and cover 95% of my cases.   You can correct exposures, crop, straighten, and fix spots/blemishes/redeye.

The UI is a bit non-standard, and I’d strongly recommend watching the tutorial videos.  Keyboard shortcuts are the key.