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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."
It stores the information in the images, as it should, and it maintains a database for fast access. And it's free.
Lightroom
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/
Lightroom is likely more than you need, but Lightroom does this.
I convert my various (nef, cr2) raw files to DNG upon importation to my library, and save metadata to the files themselves, not XML sidecar files.
While Adobe Lightroom will want work with its own database, by always syncing metadata to file you will have a 100% portable set of images.
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!
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.
Picasa is best, however, AFAIK it doesn't store the info in the files...stores the face stuff in its own database. I learned this the hard way...
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.
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/
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.
I second that reocmmendation -- I have not found a better tool than lightroom. You'll have to remember to either select the auto-write option or remember to manually sync, and quite oddly it won't let you add geotags -- it'll read them and even gives you nifty Google maps links, but it won't let you edit them; everything else you can, and the sorting and tagging features are superb. Of course it's also a brilliant editor, and not too cheap, but it's one software package I, as an avid amateur photographer, felt was worth every penny.
IIUC the geotagging has been added in LR 3.
But for those of us still on LR 2 there is the [b]excellent[/b] plugin:
http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/gps
I'm using Digikam with more than 15k files. Good program though it lacks some polish here and there.
Quick way to get 30% Funny 70% Troll: defend Opera browser on
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.
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.
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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.
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
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.
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