As the name states SiiMAN manages images, which is to say it's a program that organises just about everything to do with keeping track of 1000s of photographs.

SiiMAN is written in VB.NET on an Access database. I have to say that it took me a long time to decide to write SiiMAN in VB.NET as I wanted to get away from Microsoft propriatory code and platforms.

I made a few starts with Java and PHP but couldn't get into them, Java has grown from a nice simple OO language to full on bloatware, and much as I love PHP it realy wasn't suitable for this application.

Then I gave VB.NET 2008 a try and within days I had quite a reasonable bit of working code. I was impressed and over the last couple of weeks I've not only learnt a lot but have managed to get half an application running.

Also, as this is a rewrite of an old VB6 program some of the original code will port across which is a bonus.

SiiMAN is way off being finished but it's on the verge of being usable and replacing my old image managment application.

Click above for a full size (267k) screen grab (opens a new window).

Click above for a full size (211k) screen grab (opens a new window).

As you can see it is capable of displaying photos and the meta data from the database. Photos can be displayed as a grid or in vertical strips 1, 2, 3 or 4 photos wide.

It can also display groups of images according to their category or user-defined collections. I can do a fuzzy-logic search for keywords using AND/OR logic, and I can tag images with up to three levels of tagging.

There's a long way to go but it's starting to look the part.

So what's with the "simple" in the name? This really refers to the fact that, unlike most popular products on the market SiiMAN does not perform any image manipulation at all. I have Photoshop for that and anyway that type of software is well out of my area of expertise.

SiiMAN makes it easy to organise and archive images then find them in the future. It does not suck them into a database from which they cannot be extracted, all files stay where you want them on your system, accessible in the normal way via the operating system.

Stay tuned to see how SiiMAN works out.