Ahead of its official launch of Nero 12, Nero Inc has updated its free media-management software. Nero Kwik Media 12.0.01300 is a minor refresh that follows on from a major update that promised better performance and enhanced tagging capabilities, and offers users a one-stop shop for organising photos, video and music.

Nero Kwik Media also contains tools for creating picture-based slideshows and photobooks, and can be expanded via a number of paid-for plug-ins, providing additional functionality such as burning video DVDs and Blu-rays.

Use Nero Kwik Media 12 to organise your media in one convenient place.

The last major update of Nero Kwik Media introduced some interesting new features, all present and correct in this latest build. There’s an automatic timeline for photos and videos, plus a major revamp of the tag system: face tags for finding photos with specific people, automatic tags based on folder structure and metadata, customisable keyword tags for adding manually to photos, plus tag filtering for quick and easy media management. These can be combined in smart albums, which automatically update as new content is added with matching criteria for that album.

The software offers some other interesting tools too – you can rip music to the lossless FLAC format for example, as well as MP3 and Apple-friendly AAC. And critically, the current version is much quicker than previous, somewhat bloated versions.

It’s not all good news – certain functionality is only available through add-on modules, purchased through the app’s own Market, and with prices starting from $4.99. Much of this functionality can be found elsewhere for free – Nero Kwik DVD’s functionality can be found in Windows Live Movie Maker (part of Windows Essentials 2012) and VLC Media Player for example.

Nero Kwik Media 12.0.01300 is available now as a freeware download for fast PCs running Windows XP SP3 or later. System requirements include a 2GHz processor, 512MB RAM and 1GB free hard drive space.