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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."
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!
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.
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.
SUMMARY OF AVC/H.264 LICENSE TERMS
Retail sale - disk or download:
where an end user pays directly for video services on a title-by-title basis...royalties for video greater than 12 minutes (there is no royalty for a title 12 minutes or less) are..the lower of 2% of the price paid to the
Licensee (on first arms length sale of the video) or $0.02 per title
Subscription services:
Where an end user pays directly for video services on a subscription-basis (not ordered or limited title-by-title), the applicable royalties...payable by the service or content provider are...100,000 or fewer subscribers during the year = no royalty; greater than 100,000 to 250,000 subscribers during the year = $25,000; greater than 250,000 to 500,000 subscribers during the year = $50,000; greater than 500,000 to 1,000,000 subscribers during the year = $75,000; greater than 1,000,000 subscribers during the year =$100,000.
Sponsorship
Where remuneration is from other sources, in the case of free television [over-the-air, satellite and/or cable transmission]...which is not paid for by an End User), the licensee [the broadcaster] may pay...according to one of two royalty options: (i) a one-time payment of $2,500 per AVC transmission encoder...or (ii) annual fee per Broadcast Market starting at $2,500 per calendar year per Broadcast Markets of at least 100,000 but no more than 499,999 television households
In the case of Internet broadcast (AVC video that is delivered via the Worldwide Internet to an end user for which the end user does not pay..for the right to receive or view, i.e., neither title-by-title nor subscription), there will be no royalty during the first term of the License (ending December 31, 2010) and following term (ending December 31, 2015), after which the royalty shall be no more than the economic equivalent of royalties payable during the same time for free television.
The enterprise cap
In the case of the...sublicenses for video content or service providers, the maximum annual royalty ("cap") for an enterprise (commonly controlled legal entities) is...$5 million per year in 2010.
Renewable five-year license
License will be renewable for five-year periods...on reasonable terms and conditions which may take into account prevailing market conditions, changes in technological environment and available commercial products at the time, but for the protection of licensees, royalty rates applicable to specific license grants or specific
licensed products will not increase by more than ten percent (10%) at each renewal
To sum up:
If you are worth less than $2500 to MPEG LA they don't want to hear from you.
[Retail sale of 125,000 Trek Wars disks @ 2 cents a disk]
Under the existing formula, the licensing cost to Apple, Disney, Microsoft or Google for hosting freely distributed H.264 video on the Internet would be capped at $5 million a year.
Chicken feed.