Slashdot Mirror
A File-Centric Photo Manager?
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."
Just sayin'
Maybe Extensis Portfolio. It embeds pnot data
It stores the information in the images, as it should, and it maintains a database for fast access. And it's free.
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.
Adobe Lightroom is pretty awesome. Has a free trial. Check it out.
Picasa by Google is pretty good, too. Free.
Google Picassa is actually quite good at everything you asked for, and, it has face recognition, so once you tag one face, it generally recognises most of the images of the same person for you.
portfolio
http://sourceforge.net/projects/fototagger/
Did you try anything other than Windows 7 for your photo management software?
No, that only works with photos of a stargate.
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.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
folders, arguments and wildcards?
Sheesh. Get with the 1970s technology already ;)
I've been searching for the same feature set, a file centric image manager whose metadata is stored exclusively in the file.
One of the best ones I have found is Mapivi:
http://mapivi.sourceforge.net/mapivi.shtml
I still often use Digikam, but its metadata support is inconsistent at best. On the other hand the front end is more useable than Mapivi.
You should also look at ExifTool, because you can manipulate and query metadata with it on the command line.
http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/
If you find a solution, please share!
By Camera Bits at http://www.camerabits.com/site/
"Photo Mechanic makes it easy to add common "IPTC" (or metadata) information (like city, state, keywords, and caption) to groups of photos at once."
OS X comes with a graphical scripting tool called Automator. You can set up a batch file rename script with it that will rename every photo in a folder of your choice with the date and time added to the file name, plus a sequence number, and any other text if you desire. I used it to rename over 8000 photos originally named img_xxxx in 2 or 3 minutes.
So just copy them onto a Mac, run the Automator script on them, and copy them back.
I just use Gnome's filesystem manager called nautilus, it supports tagging and commenting filesystem files. Filenames and tags are then indexed by "tracker" which has a multitude of client interfaces and applets for searching the indexed data. I always find my fotos easily by this way.
The fotos are stored in a organized collection which the only backends are the regular filesystem and gvfs. On my collection's toplevel directory I put every event prefixed by its date:
20100105_Birthday.of.xxxx
20100120_Going.to.Ski.with.Pedro.Ana
etc..
Filesystem's features like softlinks, hardlinks allows me to keep redundancy down and the album organized. Gvfs features like tagging, commenting, setting icons and emblems do the rest. The tracker is only used for searching fotos.
Since I don't use facebook or anything similar, I have Gallery http://gallery.menalto.com/ installed on a private server. It is really great! You should try.
not gonna bore you with features here, suffice to say, it's a great tool :-)
http://www.apple.com/aperture/what-is.html
http://www.apple.com/aperture/features/
I would second Picasa. The facial recognition is very good and makes going through a lot of photos pretty fast -- I don't think that information is stored in the image file itself though.
Geotagging in Picasa is pretty good too, but it also connects easily to Google Earth for geotagging, which makes it even easier.
There is only one choice ... ... per OS.
Linux: F-Spot
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.
There's also digiKam which happens to work quite well Gnome even though it is targeted for KDE.
I evaluated many photo programs for Linux last year and digiKam came on tops. But, if you're doing HDR when editing, FSpot had that capability built in whereas digiKam didn't nor does Gimp for that matter - at the time I looked at them.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
What you really need to do is this. Buy a couple plaid shirts, some black socks and some Birks but make sure you pay a lot for them. Get some capri pants at the GAP (make sure you pay full price). Next, get some patchouli scented shave lotion and a Mac(don't worry...you will pay full price for this and we have begun. Go home set up your make and get changed, you are now a Mac owner! You will find that tagging, sorting,arranging via meta data is easy. Its living that has become hard. Now you must tag everything using iambic pantameter and haiku. Instead of tagging things buy the current dating system use what day of the BP disaster it is. If your wife asks you what you are doing, try to be condescending... no one understands you anymore but steve. While tagging your photos try to use the words postmodern and neo a lot. it will begin to feel natural soon... Good luck! A new mac user| so fragile and delicate| like leaves on a breeze
sig loading.......
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Lightroom is the best for this kind of work. you can batch-update their EXIF data (EXIF is the extended file information location for images), and organize it based on files and folders in physical locations on the drive. Picasa is a good amateur tool but won't let you have the custom control Lightroom gives you.
Read what I mean, not what I wrote.
http://download.live.com/
Install Windows Live PhotoGallery from the Windows Live Essentials. This is exactly what it is designed for and can do smart tagging.
Even though Win7 doesn't install the 'Essentials' applications, they really are 'Essential' to get the most out of Windows7. There is also a download link for them in the Start Menu, and you can pick and choose what you want easily.
Doing all your tagging via Explorer is functional, but not the optimal way of dealing with Photos in Windows 7. In Photogallery you just drag and drop to tag photos or use the face identification system.
(The June beta of the next generation of Live Essentials and PhotoGallery should be along soon as well with several new tricks that pulls in several of the MS Photo R&D work.)
*Don't waste your time with 'Album' or other tagging software that shoves your photos into their file structure, which is a LOT of them.
Iphoto, picassa, lightroom, aperture.
Besides finding bits of useful metadata in exif, filename, date, and content, the biggest issue will be able to wade through the data quickly and in human time.
Lightroom is available for Beta. If you have the images, try it with say Picasso. This should give you a good enough feeling as to whether you should pay for it.
But products like lightroom and aperture are exactly designed for your problem.
Photoshop Elements is a good choice. I have over 15,000 images. The windows version is good at organizing. You can tag, group, etc. Once you've collected the tags, etc, you can write the information to the actual images as exif metadata so that you are not dependent upon the embedded Microsoft Access db they use. You can also leave the images where they are in PSE and don't need to move them around or stick them in a proprietary db.
For comparison I've also tried Photoshop Lightroom, Apple's Apperture, and Iphoto (the latter two are os/x only). I found PSE to be superior to any of these and cheaper too.
I've heard that Picasa is good too but I have no experience with it.
Hope that helps.
I will only use it when they get rid of mono dependency.
It has mass-batch processing capability including mass visible-watermark-addition capabilities, mass-thumbnailing, mass-resizing/reformatting/file-type-change. Earlier versions - 3.8 is one if I recall - had mass JPEG-comment-editing features. I can't seem to get that to work in 4.23. The current version is 4.27.
It or another program that does the same things is a must have if you are going to be making wholesale changes to a lot of pictures.
Windows. Free as in beer for non-commercial users including home and charities.
http://www.irfanview.com/
I was recently wanting to do something similar. I decided on using the open source Digikam software (which may not be an option for you under Windows), because it has powerful photo management functionality, but also because it stores tags and more all as XMP data directly within my JPEG file.
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.
Oh, I forgot to mention that my initial photo load was 3400-ish photos. So, about half the size of the OPs set of photos.
Insightful! Informative! Funny! All of the Above!
Brilliant!!
Three Squirrels
On a generic note, there's lots of Exif tools about. Under Linux I use exiftool in a script I use to take photos from an SD card. So personally, I script it since I can just set it going, and leave it be.
Funnyhacks - Wierd, unusual, and fun hacks
It's designed for managing flipping huge numbers of files.
This does everything you want, but only runs on Linux. Which is interesting because it is written in C#. I use it to manage 25k photos.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=windows+7+photo+management
Seriously, it's like one of those retarded forum users who doesn't even bother to check the first couple pages of topics before posting a question that has been answered a hundred times over.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
You should look closely at Photo Mechanic. It's not free or OSS, but it works very, very well. It is more of a metadata manager than a photo management database - it doesn't maintain its own database; it uses your existing folder structure.
It doesn't do any retouching, but it is flexible in letting you edit (select/reject), sort, and manage metadata for tons of photos. This sounds like the sort of software you're looking for.
It's practically the standard in the news/media photography industry, and it's widely used in other pro photographers' workflows.
Yes it costs money, but it does a ton of things. It keeps a database for your tags/whatever but you can have it apply any and all info it knows about your pictures to the EXIF/IPTC fields. There's a ton of scriptability and you can export the DB to tons of formats (and define your own format). Hey just looked at the website and it supports XMP as well (another metadata in the file thing).
http://www.photools.com/
No I get nothing for this (haven't even looked to see if I could). Satisfied customer.
Photo Mechanic. It's what the pros use to do exactly what you're asking for.
Nothing is inexplicable; only unexplained -Tom Baker, Doctor Who
Aperture (from Apple, runs only on Macs, sorry) is probably the best fit for what you want to do.
It has face recognition now, it allows you to batch assign locations, it has tag management in that it has the ability to define tag sets to quickly apply to photos, to edit a tag library for general tag entry, and do very fast searches across the whole library by tags or any other photo metadata.
What it does not do, is store those tags in the file itself since the deal with Aperture is that the underlying philosophy is, never modify the master image. However the reason it would work for you is because you can easily export to pretty much anywhere through Aperture - there are a ton of export presets (and you can modify any of those or create new ones), and an export API that gives you export workflows for things like Flickr and so on - any of these options can include any metadata, including custom tags you have defined.
It also handles videos now which is quite helpful, I'm not sure how exactly tags work with exporting those as I don't use that much yet.
Image organization and searching is I think Aperture's strong point over something like Lightroom - since you seem very focused on that problem I thought this might be a good fit. Both Aperture and Lightroom have free trials to see if you like how they flow.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If anyone has some additional info on this I'd be glad to hear it.
Carey
IView Media Pro did it all, then MSFT bought them, named it Microsoft Expression Media, and just recently sold it to Phase One.
Who knows if that product will evert live again. At least phase One is always in the right field for this product.
OP needs an app that supports reading and writing IPTC metadata. Pretty straightforward.
Parent is right that Picasa has inconsistent and proprietary behavior. It uses INI files in each folder that store most of the developing and album information in plaintext. So you can tweak and recover that to a certain degree. But it has a separate database for caption data. If you make a caption change and commit changes to disk, the captions are not updated in the JPG or the INI. (AFAIK)
I use Adobe Lightroom for both personal and professional work. So far very impressed with the newest version 3.0. Because of Picasa and Lightroom's non-destructive editing, you do have to export files to commit image adjustments.
All of the metadata tagging and keywording you do in Lightroom is written into the file itself (providing you have it set to save those changes instantly, or you can save on command). Using IPTC and other standard formats means that apps like Picasa and Flickr can read that information. And those standard tags are automatically picked up by any decent OS searching tool like Spotlight.
I don't do what you do with image management, but this product does a lot. You can get a free trial, and if you register with the company you will get an extended trial (I think it's 40 days). http://www2.ashampoo.com/webcache/html/1/product_2_1018___USD.htm Once you've registered a trial key, you will get offers from time to time. One of those offers is a name your own price deal which they do about every other month or so. While this normally sells for $50, you can probably get it for $15 or $20. They don't accept just any offer you make, so it's not truly name your own price, but they usually accept less than 1/2 of their normal price.
Geeqie http://geeqie.sourceforge.net/ does all this.
You can create/search (nested if you like) tags/comments. Everything is written to file if you want. Geeqie will even write XMP sidecars for tagging your RAW files. It can treat your jpegs+ raw as a single file. It can treat png+raw as a single file. It integrates nicely with Ufraw or dcraw. You can do loss-less rotate or really apply it to the file. It needs very few libraries.
Plus it is the fastest RAW viewer on Linux (maybe on any OS? aside from Fastpictureviewer? It's close).
Elements has the best organizer that I've found. It lets you create a catalog of tags in a tree structure along with a thumbnail for each. You can create tags for places too. Dragging a tag to the map (maps provided via internet connection by Yahoo, so no internet, no maps) assigns the GPS coordinates which are then passed along to the pictures assigned to that tag. Photos are presented chronologically with a bar graph at the top that lets you also see how many photos per month you've taken. Although Photoshop Elements does keep this information in a catalog, you also have the option of writing everything back to the file. After you've tagged your photos, you can filter based on any combination of tags. It'll even let you navigate to a point on the map and limit your search to photos taken in that area. Of course it also has excellent photo editing capabilities along with the ability to create slideshows and many other things.
Use J River Media Center. Its fabulous for bulk tagging, imports, tagging based on filename, bulk renames, views, and more! Also has a great API! I do not work for the company. You will thank me later.
WinFS? Nope. Ok, how about XAM?
Picasa doesn't store its tagging info locally in each directory; this information is put in the "Program Files"
I'm often surprised by how few people understand how Picasa really works, as this is not the case.
Any potentially 'destructive' changes to a photo are stored in a picasa.ini file in each folder. These changes include rotations, cropping, sharpen, etc. When you view a photo in picasa, it displays with all these changes applied. You can undo a change at any time. Changes are NOT applied to the file on disk until you press 'save'.
To be clear, there is no magic, hidden, or proprietary database; it's just a simple per-directory picasa.ini file. As for backups, if you've backed up the directory including the picasa.ini file, then any non-saved changes will be backed up.
Non-destructive changes, such as captions or tags, are applied immediately to the photo. Again, to be clear, these are applied directly to the photo and can be read by any other photo tool that can read exif data.
The one exception to this is the recently introduced face tagging feature. Unfortunately, Google really messed up with their implementation of this feature. Facial tags are stored in a combination of the picasa.ini file & a central database. I've found the implementation to be quite poor, and I would not recommend using this feature.
On Linux machines Geeqie is quite effective:
http://geeqie.sourceforge.net/
It views, sorts, and writes metadata of various types directly to the image.
He'll know much more quickly if there's a virus or backdoor, as someone in the community is likely to discover it first.
Don't forget that Picasa has lightning fast searching capabilities allowing you to search by filename, tag, caption, etc.
If your interested in in really changing a lot of the IPTC/XMP/Exif info, then you should check out this great little program... http://www.geosetter.de/en .
It is a little diff then what you might be looking for but it does a good job at writing back to the images and it does batch files which will speed up changing info on large folders of photos. you can also create IPTC/XMP/Exif templates as well. Doesnt hurt to at least check it out.
http://jbrout.python-hosting.com/wiki Cross platform. Claims to have been tested on GNU/Linux and Windows XP/2K. Been meaning to try it as my own photo collection is starting to get a little unwieldy, but haven't done so yet.
i dont remember the name, but there is a GPS system for photo tagging the location into the files.
you carry it while shooting and with the time synced on the camera and gps you can know where you were at what time.
a flash card from each device and a little software on the computer to put the tags on it
wasn't much more expensive that a portable gps.
It's not specifically made for images, but Directory Opus is one of the best and most advanced Windows-based file managers out there. There is almost nothing you cannot do with it. I have personally used it to re-tag a 20,000-song MP3 library (and subsequently rename every file based on tag).
I can vouch for the robustness of DNG files. I lost a HDD, recovered most of the files, dumped them back into Lightroom and everything was retained, even my ratings and edit history. DNG is an awesome format.
check ACDSee best photo manager, handles tags, ratings, xmp, etc.
When I was looking at photo management software, one of the primary features I wanted was that the original image NEVER be modified. From my point of view it is extremely important that no matter what I do, I should always be able to go back to the original jpeg or raw image captured by the camera. probably the best solution is to store the original image, store in a database all the metadata and modification data and an image file made by taking the original and applying all the changes.
I use bibble (http://www.bibblelabs.com). Pretty great RAW developer with advanced catalog functions and possibility to write everything in XMP files, which are compatible with pretty much everything.
On your own system you could simply take advantage of Long File Names to associate a modest amount of data with an image. If you really want the data inside the file, though, then almost any image-manipulation tool will let you do that. Take "good old Microsoft Paint" for example. You can take an image that is, say, 300x400 pixels and paste it into a completely blank image where you have specified a size of 300x500 pixels. Your original image now occupies the upper part of this new image, and you have 300x100 pixels, below that image, where you can draw stuff or use the Text tool to type stuff. Then simply save it.
It's RAW processing software, so it does much more.
http://bibblelabs.com/
I guess you meant gratis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis .
On the Mac try PhotoLinker. http://www.earlyinnovations.com/ It has a very nice customizable metadata editor and is an excellent geotagger.
Just use picasa. It does everything you want, has automatic face recognition/tagging, is file-based, works on both windows and unix, is free...
Move sig!
Digikam! It can save tags in metadata, it can geotag and it works with large photo collections. I don't know how it works on Win (available via the KDE windows installer) but on GNU+Linux it's great. And it's free (as in speech and as in beer).
FlashPipe from www.ddisoftware.com
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The rest of the world do not have software patents, so we don't care about MPEG.LA
Just host it outside the USA, and everything is fine.
In most countries, a contract is an agreement between 2 parties. So unless they have a paper with my signature, I am not bound by any contract with them. I think USA is the only country where you can enter a contract without knowing so, and without ever accepting it.
I think the US of A should look to the free world for how things are done.
This is a young program designed to catalog photographs: http://vvvp.sourceforge.net/ Linux, OS X and Windows. It stores everything in a single file so it is easy to backup. It does not store tags in the image itself, but this will be added in future versions.
That works the same way as every other lawsuit between a large corporation and a normal person. They claim you had twelve billion downloads and leave it to you to prove beyond any doubt that number is incorrect.
Even if you can somehow prove (not with your own statistics, they could be tampered with) you haven't had over a million downloads you would be bankrupt before you've ever seen the inside of a courtroom.
I've seen it up close. Guy down the street did nothing wrong, got his with obviously bogus claims. Now he lives in a cardboard box.
Windows 7 has some built in functionality to do this You can tag multiple photos at once, just select a group of photos in explorer then a) At bottom of Windows explorer you may see 'more details' click that to update certain fields on all selected photos (i.e. add tags) b) right click a selected group of photos and choose properties. In the details view some fields that it will let you update will update for all selected photos at once You can then set the pictures to be arranged 'by Tag' in the Explorer view. This assumes your folder has been set up for 'pictures' view. To do this right click in a blank spot within your pictures folder and choose 'Properties' then click the 'Customize' tab. Set 'Optimize this folder' to 'Pictures' You should also look into 'Windows Advanced Query Search Syntax' Which you can use straight from the explorer or start menu search bar to filter your searches. Some options available for pictures include: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/desktopsearch/technicalresources/advquery.mspx You can use the results of a search, select the search results then apply properties to all those pictures at once.
Picasa saves all tags and geotags in exif at once Faces can be saved as tags! First let picasa index faces, then create a tag for each person and select each group of pictures with each faces to tag the person And use graphic converter for advanced exif handling
Is there a "save all changes" option in Picasa? Or do you have to hit Save on every individual file that you've modified in Picasa?
For example, I'd like to do this:
1. back up all the original files,
2. run "Save All Changes" in Picasa
3. migrate to a different photo manager
The reality of family photos is that there are way too many of them. Picasa is great because non-geek family members can easily edit their photos, but if at some point all those edits can "disappear", it loses a great deal of its appeal.
Om
Incidently, Microsoft provides a tool to do just what you're asking. It is free, runs only on Windows, and changes it makes to the files are Adobe-compatible.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
https://launchpad.net/phraymd
Opensource and multiplatform. oh, and lightweight as well.
A bit of curiosity goes a long way in any situation.
If you had any you would have noticed that the picures are modified *and* saved is so you wish, and that a copy of the original picture is kept (which is fundamental, no sel respecting photographer wants to lose the original).
I use Exifer, to update the jpg's internal EXIF data. It is postcard-ware, good for mass tagging. I use it to insert tags into description fields, then use its renaming template to name files like " 20100517-112920 Market below Blue mosque.jpg"
I do not believe there is a 'save all' feature within Picasa that will save ALL changes.
There is a 'save edited photos to disk' button within each folder that will save all changes made to that particular folder, but I don't know of any way to save change picasa-wide.
I guess the answer is tell your non-geek family members to press the 'save edited photos to disk' when they finish an editing session. (I forgot to mention earlier that when you press this button, picasa will back up the original photos to a subdirectory)
I wrote a blog entry a few years ago discussing how to do this with ACDSee and Fotki here - http://frozenpixels.wordpress.com/upload-your-acdsee-photos-to-fotki-with-tags/ I still stand behind ACDSee, but recommend against the pro version, as I've yet to see any functionality there that requires most users to upgrade. ACDSee lets you tag/categorize photos and videos, and is still very fast with my 18,xxx photo collection. You can export the entire catalog database to an easily read XML file, so you aren't locked into a proprietary format for life. Additionally, the ability to embed your tags/categories into the images (or vice versa - import existing tag data into ACDSee's database) is a feature sorely missing from most other utilities. Some other nice features are the ability to sort just about any way you'd want to, simple and/or filters (show me pictures that have Bob AND Tom, etc.), calendar views, and decent basic editing to crop, fix red-eye, and so on. I think there's a trial version you can download and play with. I'm still running version 7.0, and haven't seen a compelling reason to upgrade. There are free alternatives out there, but none possess all of the features of ACDSee, and most are missing some key ones IMO.
My Tech Posts on Twitter
O'Reilly has a book on Digital Asset Management, The DAM Book by Peter Krogh. Check out his web site at: http://thedambook.com/ There are several forums there where you can ask your question.
There is a little known, outside of the news publishing business, technology known as IPTC captioning that can be of considerable help in handling images and ensuring proper captioning of the same. Sponsored by the International Press Telecommunications Council, the IPTC captions can travel with a photograph or image and can then be extracted and placed into a database as needed. They are commonly used in pictures distributed by news agencies such as the Australian Associated Press (AAP).
Many modern image processing applications such as Adobe Photoshop support image information in the IPTC format. In addition there is freeware and programing tools in PHP and Perl which support the adding of information.
Here is a link with a page I did about using IPTC caption data to show alt text for the blind. should give you an idea as to how to use them:
http://www.cucat.org/projects/navigation/images/
I like iTag (not associated with Apple). It tags images using the IPTC (JPEG) and XMP (JPEG, RAW, TIFF, PNG, AVI, MP4, MP3, and WAV) headers to store tags. I like it because it lets you mass tag as well as Geotag.
The down sides are that it uses .NET, doesn't have a Linux version, and the free version limits you to 3 tags per file.
http://www.itagsoftware.com
This isn't exactly what you're looking for, but you may want to try TagTeam (http://www.andrew-quinney.com/tagteam.html). This uses filesystem metadata to store image tags so the data is stored with the file (will be moved with it when the file is copied, moved, etc.) rather than in the file. This means that there won't be a chance of corrupting certain file formats as mentioned above but these tags wouldn't stick when you upload the files.
n/t
Picasa stores some things, including titles and tags, in IPTC data within the image files themselves. This is great, since it lets you carry these things around with the files when you move them to another image viewer, etc.
I wish it did the same thing with albums, but album data is stored in a separate file. In principle there are IPTC tags (like "collections") that could be used to record album-membership information within the image file itself, but Picasa doesn't do it that way.
From their website.
"IrfanView is a very fast, small, compact and innovative FREEWARE (for non-commercial use) graphic viewer for Windows 9x, ME, NT, 2000, XP, 2003 , 2008, Vista, Windows 7."
http://www.irfanview.com/
Get a Mac and use iPhoto. It has face recognition honors metadata and if it don't support by default a function connected with an certain meta tag you can easily script it with Apple script -google is ur friend.
But there are probably many other even better, Apples Aperture allow you to group pictures in timeline.
But for this kind of stuff you know why Mac users are Mac users. Simple, technically advanced and most of all cheap in support costs.
My recommendation is go to an Apple Store with your whole library have an Apple technician show you how, if he impress you buy the mac you can afford. Done.
don't listen to anyone saying to use iPhoto it's garbage....
use lightroom, convert the files to DNG, lightroom will save the metadata, keywords et al to the DNG file....
i manage over 45,000 images in lightroom, film and digital shot since 1998
Yes, it has a database, but it sync's to the metadata in the file.
The part I like best is the "tags, with hierarchy". Maybe that's just a sign I have too many tags. You can't really get that feature without paying money, (photoshop elements, lightroom, IMatch) and this tool seems the best of them to me. (not as slow as elements, better features than the other two, not too expensive)
A few people above have mentioned the "thou shalt not touch the originals" principle, which I personally don't quite believe in, but it is possible with IdImager: You can set up the downloader to mirror to another location for backup or whatever.
IdImager has a bunch of other advanced features I haven't fully taken advantage of yet, like Stacks, Versioning, and scripting. It has a face detector, but it isn't as good as picasa's. Still, it's something, and picasa's tag system is horrible.
Overall, the best image organizer available right now. Technically I guess it is a general-purpose DAM, since it can import other file types, but it definitely focuses on images.
-- The above may have once been believed by me, but any truth or application you find is your own problem.
With feh, you can run a specific command for any keypress (actually 0-9) while viewing the image. Using this command, associate file metadata using setfattr. If you need user input, open a dialog box from this command which in turn will be stored as metadata. Advantages:
1. No dependency on any new-fangled databases.
2. Metadata is independent of image codec/container/technology etc. Supports most popular formats - png, jpg, gif etc.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Use DNG files with Lightroom. You get the best of everything: the original file untouched, and all your edits and adjustments, meta data, keywords etc stored inside the file. http://lightroomkillertips.com/2007/video-dng-and-lightroom/
They had an early native port back in 2008 - I'm assuming it should be pretty stable by now. (I use Digikam under Linux and am very pleased with it...I've not used Windows in quite some time, but if the native Windows port is anywhere near as good as the Linux version it ought to do what the original poster wants quite nicely.)
http://www.digikam.org/drupal/node/378
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
can't seem to find car-version
I can do better than that! I'd like to present the transformers analogy - it's like a car analogy, but it changes into a robot analogy!
Let's say the GPL and MPEG LA are both kind of like jeeps - both are utilitarian enough to help you accomplish quite a lot, but they can be rather unwieldy, too. We could say that GPL is more like the old army jeep and its relatives - it gives you access to a lot of things but it comes with its own hindrances. But you have the opportunity to pick through what's out there, perhaps finding something useful and affordable, or at least salvageable. MPEG-LA is more like the XR311 or HMMWV - it gives you a lot more capability but with a correspondingly higher price.
Now, when they turn into robots - GPL is like a force for good. It's the result of a conscientious effort to change the world for the better. However, to accomplish its aims it has to use its leverage - some would say this is a sort of trickery, drawing people in to use GPL software and then snaring them with obligations. In robot terms this would be like projecting holograms to fool people into doing certain things.
MPEG-LA is, of course, much more profit-minded. Perhaps it's not really "evil" though some people might say it is - but it's generally serving its own ends. It's important to note that the MPEG-LA is really just one part of a larger system... To return to the robot analogy, it's as though the MPEG-LA were part of a team that could combine to form a bigger robot, with the MPEG-LA acting as an arm or a leg, while other intellectual property groups could form the other limbs and the torso. Together, they would form a massive digital media powerhouse.
Bow-ties are cool.
(Disclaimer: I work for Extensis)
Extensis Portfolio stores metadata in a database for fast searching and has an option to write metadata into files. The software supports XMP, EXIF as well as IPTC and automatically extracts GPS and the date/time taken. Photos can be organized into galleries, tagged with keywords, or you can create your own custom metadata fields and tags.
There’s also a server version available for multi-user workgroups/enterprise.
You mention Windows 7 tags, but if I were you I would avoid any proprietary protocol, such as used by any Microsoft products. Try and find something generic or at least opensource.
For adding exifdata to a number of photos at once, you can use exiftool http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/ I also use NikonviewNX to add titles to my photos. This is free from Nikon.
However, I don't touch the originals and only update copies of the photos.
Once you have data in the photo's exifdata, you can extract for other purposes using exiftool or the underlying libraries.
Alan
I've always been a huge fan of ACDSee Photo Manager. It lets me manage my photos in folders as I always have without any sort of import, and do everything you've asked for. It also has some great tools for renaming files/modifying dates that I just haven't found in other apps.
I found this workaround in the support forum: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Picasa/thread?tid=0fc1904e15cc777c&hl=en
1. in the upper right search box, search for jpg. (Presumably this will find all your photos)
2. In the upper left, under Albums, you should see a an album called 'Search results for "jpg"
3. Click the album name to enter the album. You should then be able to press the 'save' button to save all changes to disk.
Agreed - it doesn't autorotate photos based on EXIF info. It will auto rotate when you import, but not later.
Hopefully the next version (due this summer) will fix this.
Whenever you say "easy to use" and don't specify a target user you are automatically wrong. All interfaces must be learned, even the nipple. A person who has mastered a powerful, terse interface will find it easier to do things with that interface (faster, too) than using something unfamiliar designed for a shallow learning curve.
I think you meant "easier for non-programmers who already understand a similar GUI paradigm" or something like that.
I don't know if you want it NOW, but pivot is around the corner and may be just what you are looking for...
http://www.technologyreview.com/video/?vid=533&channel=computing
jbrout does what you want. It can add tags to the file...doesn't move the files around...it can change the timestamps in the file and rotate it non-destructively...all with choosing multiple files.
http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~geoff/digicam/camcomment
The key is that you use your favorite viewer to look at photos, and your favorite editor to edit the embedded EXIF comment information. All the data is stored inside the photos themselves. Simple tools like exiftool can then extract the data and put it into a database or wherever you want. Editor abbreviations can make tagging quick and easy; I even have simple "next photo" commands in my editor (emacs) so I don't have to move my cursor between windows.
I find Digikam works pretty well for me, and (I believe) fits all of your criteria.
You may need to check a box somewhere in the configuration to tell it to write metadata to the file by default, though.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Gee, an article about photo organizers yields an "offtopic" rating for a posting about... a photo organizing tool. Show yourself, coward - or be dealt a heavy blow in meta-mod.
Some people just hate Apple so much they lose all rational thought. It's a shame, really.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Whenever you say "easy to use" and don't specify a target user you are automatically wrong.
Whenever you make sweeping generalizations you are automatically wrong (note that I ram not talking about a generalization but only yourself).
Automator is easier FOR a coder, because fundamentally you understand what is happening. Recording of actions was faster in emacs than writing lisp to do the same actions, even when I knew elisp pretty well - and the fundamental fact that recording a framework of actions onto which you hang customization is still far faster than coding from scratch.
Automator is not really that usable by non-programmers, I know as I have tried to help others use it. It's a huge time savings when you know what you are doing no matter how good you are at scripting.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Check out the IPTC photo metadata standards IIM and "IPTC Core"
http://www.iptc.org/cms/site/index.html?channel=CH0089
They have a list of software here:
http://www.iptc.org/cms/site/photometadatasupportlist.html?channel=CH0101
I tried posting this the other night but it does not look like it went through. I know it is a little diff then what your looking for but it may be worth your while to take a quick look at Geosetter. It was developed for geotagging is great for writing/updating metadata (IPTC/XMP/Exif) and it has a nice interface. You can create templates and run batch files. It also uses Phil Harveys ExifTool as well, as one other person above had mentioned.
It is worth giving it a look.
http://www.geosetter.de/en