How to manage your images in a photo editor

Q I have a collection of over 4,000 35mm slides I have scanned and saved on an external hard drive. Is there any software (free or at a price) I can use to form an album or a series of albums?

I have tried several, both free and paid for, but they all take over. I want to be able to decide which files and/or folders the program will deal with. Unfortunately, they all think that they can do a better job and proceed to dig out digital images from every one of my hard drives, including images from help files of programs which I did not even know were on my computer!

As I have already backed up most of my images on to another external hard drive you can understand how I feel when the programs tell me they have 'found' umpteen thousand items!
George Jones.

A Our recommended photo editor, Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 has a sophisticated organiser that not only allows you to specify which folders on your hard disk to search for images, but can monitor watched folders for new content. When you add pictures to a watched folder Photoshop Elements can either notify you or simply add the new content to your library.

For free, try Google Picasa 3. Initially, it will do exactly what you don't want, ie scan every location on your hard drive for images. But you can then use the Folder Manger to remove any folders you don't want scanned