Shoebox is an application for organizing digital photos by content.

Before Shoebox

Folders allow you to store files in a hierarchy. For example, you could sort your pictures into folders by date, place, person or thing. This works great when you only have a few pictures. But since you can only store pictures in once place, you need to make a decision about how to sort each picture.

The problem is, once you have thousands of photos, you rapidly forget how you organized each one. Think back, how many times have you remembered a photo that you wanted to show someone, only you were unable to actually find it?

Introducing Categories

Ideally, you'd like to be albe to organize each picture by date, place, person, and thing. Shoebox introduces a new concept called categories. Categories have a hierarchy like folders, and you can have lots and lots of them. But unlike folders, you can add photos to as many categories as you would like. Every photo has a date and a place. Some pictures are of several people, and some have several things.

How does Shoebox know what's in each picture? Every photo has a time stamp from the camera, so that part's easy. Then you get to tell it the rest. This process will take a while, but Shoebox tries to make it as easy as possible. And it's so worth it.