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Flexible Photo Organization Software?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the you'd-think-they'd-have-stuff-with-these-features dept.

Matthew Wecksell asks: "Several years after getting a digital camera, I find myself with far too many pictures to keep track of, with multiple folders titled 'At the Beach' and so on. Picassa will not let me assign multiple labels to a picture and then search against those labels the way iTunes will with my music (eg: Show me all pictures with '"Grandma Foo" and not "Grandma Bar"' to find pics that have just one of my two grandmothers). Also, I'd like to find a solution that lets me export the meta data or keep it in the picture files, not a proprietary database, so that in ten or twenty years, I can use another program on another platform and still have useful tags assigned to my pictures that I'm taking today — I have no interest in re-tagging my pics. Has anyone found a good solution to the picture organization problem? Is there any standard 'ID3' style for putting metadata into an EXIF header?"

6 of 131 comments (clear)

  1. Hmm. by BJH · · Score: 4, Informative
    Is there any standard 'ID3' style for putting metadata into an EXIF header?


    Why, yes, and they're described in section 4.6 of the EXIF specification.
    1. Re:Hmm. by jmkaza · · Score: 4, Informative

      Of course, actually reading section 4.6 shows that the only tags available are TIFF Attributes indicating such exciting information as the 'Subsampling ratio of Y to C', and the ever useful 'White point chromaticity'.
      As far as convenient ID3 type info that you can do something with; no.

  2. Re:"me too" by Viraptor · · Score: 5, Informative
    No idea what system are you using, but if it's Linux, then try F-Spot (http://f-spot.org/Main_Page). It's basically Picasa, but:
    • uses labels (normal text ones) AND tags with tag hierarchy, so you can tag it with "My room" and it will also get parent tags "Home", "My city", "My country" and "Place". Any number of tags allowed, along with complex searches (("Grandma foo" OR "Grandma bar") AND EXCLUDE "My room" is possible)
    • has less "effects", but
    • has more sliders in color / contrast correction + histogram
    • supports camera and folder import

    And yes - it has Picasaweb export!
    Additionally it's a new project and is actively developed. Tags are kept in database, so network sharing will probably work with good configuration. Changes are kept like in Picasa - it always keeps the original file without modifications.
  3. DigiKam by ajs318 · · Score: 4, Informative

    I used to use a simple script to I wrote to create an index.html page from a directory of photos. This worked surprisingly well; but then I discovered digikam, and now I wouldn't look back.

    --
    Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
  4. IPTC metadata is what you want by pauljlucas · · Score: 4, Informative
    Is there any standard 'ID3' style for putting metadata into an EXIF header?
    IPTC allows lots of metadata, e.g., caption, category, city, headline, keywords, etc. Google for it. Note that IPTC has nothing to do with EXIF. For JPEG files, IPTC metadata is stored in the segment having the APPD marker.
    --
    If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
  5. photolibrary by ed_g2s · · Score: 5, Informative

    I ran into this problem a few years ago, and so started work on my own project which I now use to keep my collection of 8500+ photos organised. Categories (tags/labels/...) are arranged in a tree, and are assigned to photos.
    So have a look at http://photolibrary.sourceforge.net/ (or http://sourceforge.net/projects/photolibrary)