A File-Centric Photo Manager? 326
JeremyDuffy writes "I have a photo project of over 7,000 photos. I want to tag them based on location, time of day, who's in them, etc. Doing this by hand one at a time through the Windows 7 interface in Explorer is practically madness. There has to be a better way. Is there a photo manager that can easily group and manage file tags? And most importantly, something that stores the tag and other data (description etc.) in the file, not just a database? I don't care if the thing has a database, but the data must be in the file so when I upload the files to the Internet, the tags are in place."
There is only one choice ... (Score:2, Interesting)
There is only one choice ... ... per OS.
Windows: Picasa
Linux: F-Spot
OS X: iPhoto
I've used all three and with the inclusion of "free" they are, in my not so humble opinion, the best option for each platform.
Re:Windows Live Photo Gallery (Score:5, Interesting)
Seconded.
It's really a fascinating indicator of the situation Microsoft is in that they are so scared to include or promote basic photo gallery features in Win7 that people like this are completely unaware it exists.
For my money I like it much better than Picasa for the simple reason that it treats your photos *as files* rather than as a *database*. I got completely fed up with Picasa *pretending* it had modified my files when it had really only made changes in it's own database. Then you give photos to someone else and you find Picasa never really applied any of your changes. Or worse, you ditch Picasa and find out that years of long hard work is gone because Picasa was privately storing all that information (even things like rotations, cropping, etc.). (Yes, I know it has some option somewhere to turn this off. I resent the fact they make it the default).
Re:Windows Live Photo Gallery (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Adobe Bridge (Score:4, Interesting)
Adobe Bridge sounds perfect.
Besides being one of the best photo managers I have worked with, you can directly edit the metadata for each file. The only downside is that it usually comes bundled with other Adobe software, which can be costly.
Yea, that seems like a significant draw-back.
So, what, I spend $700 for photoshop (and at least have something useful for my money), or buy InCopy for $250 and just install Bridge since InCopy is useless crap by itself?
There's got to be a better way of tagging photo files than dealing with Adobe, their crappy website, and their annoying phone-home DRM.
Anything that uses XMP should work well. (Score:5, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Metadata_Platform
There is work being done to do face recognition to tag people in photos, one of the things that is taking most of the time for me.
My application was a custom photo-blog, with some neat tag-based features (like "show me the pictures taken at this person's house that have this oher person it them").
So, I tag them in digikam, do cropping and comments, and then save the image. I then wrote some Python programs to check this data for consistency, and to load the data into a database for the web server. The web server also has the ability to edit tags and comments, so I then have code to, once reviewed, write these changes out to the XMP meta-data.
But, the photos themselves are the authoritative source for this information. If I lost the database, no problem. The photos are the authoritative source for all that information.
Oh, I forgot to mention that one of the tools in the upload chain is to get rid of albums and instead encode it in the file with a tag called something like "Blog/Group/$UUID_STRING". It also saves off the "album thumbnail" in a similar way ("Blog/Group/IsAlbumThumbnail").
It's worked extremely well.
I use the command-line "exiv2" program to export and import the XMP data as XML, then I process it (the parts mentioned above) as XML.
Re:Adobe bridge? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Copy them to a Mac, use Automator (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Windows Live Photo Gallery (Score:3, Interesting)
I like Lightroom's approach -- a mix of database, sidecar files, and ability to write the metadata back into the files if I want to. Doesn't fit your casual user paradigm, but addresses your problems. Also, any of the modern photo workflow tools deal with the concept of a digital negative and allow you to do edits, changes etc. non-destructively, where all the actual image edits are stored in a sidecar or a copy of the original.
Re:Windows Live Photo Gallery (Score:5, Interesting)
>MPEG LA doesn't forbid sharing of anything.
Yes, it DOES.
If you have enough "subscribers" if you do not charge per download (over 100,000) you MUST PAY A LICENSE FEE. And these fees are much steeper than Over-The-Air video, because the Internet is somehow special.
If you make video LONGER THAN 12 MINUTES and distribute it you must pay 2% royalties *or* 2 cents per movie, whichever is greater. If your home movie becomes popular and is more than 12 minutes and you have not paid your two cents per download (even if you do not charge for it!) and they take notice of it, you will soon see the sky blacken with lawyers.
If your video is longer than 12 minutes, MPEG-LA has its hooks in your content whether you like it or not. Even if it's a home movie of your kids that is 13 minutes long, you owe MPEG-LA money if you "broadcast" it over the Internet. Even if you give it away, the minimum charge is 2 cents per download as described above.
http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/The-H.264-Licensing-Labyrinth-65403.aspx [streamingmedia.com]
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BMO
Re:Windows Live Photo Gallery (Score:5, Interesting)
Fun, huh?
It's for the best (Score:3, Interesting)
He'll know much more quickly if there's a virus or backdoor, as someone in the community is likely to discover it first.
Looked into jBrout? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Windows Live Photo Gallery (Score:3, Interesting)
Interesting. Since when does patent override Copyright on pure content?
Re:Windows Live Photo Gallery (Score:4, Interesting)
ACTA is going to fix that.
So bend over and take it, just like the rest of us.
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BMO
Re:Windows Live Photo Gallery (Score:3, Interesting)
When did they make me sign the agreement. How are they going to enforce it on me? I did not breach the patent as I did not make the camera.